One week after a powerful earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, shortages of key materials slowed relief efforts even as international aid arrived, and hospitals struggled to care for the large numbers of people requiring urgent help.
The death toll for both countries surpassed 37,000 on Monday, with more than a million people in Turkey alone left homeless.
One of the most urgent needs was temporary shelter for the homeless in Turkey, which is in short supply. The Turkish Red Crescent, a humanitarian organisation, said it was speeding up the production of tents to house those displaced after Turkish news media reported a shortage of temporary housing and of poor sanitary conditions for the homeless.
And while aid is flowing into Turkey, relatively little has reached Opposition-held parts of northern Syria because of political divisions on the ground after years of civil war. And much of the aid that did go in was not always the most urgently needed items, such as food.
Inside Turkey, damaged roads in the quake zone and closed airports over the past week in some areas have also slowed the flow of aid.
As President Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey came under criticism for his government’s response to the earthquake, the country’s deadliest since 1939, officials on Monday detained more property developers and others suspected of having a hand in shoddy construction that violated existing building codes, according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency.
One of the latest people to be detained was Ibrahim Mustafa Uncuoglu, a contractor of a collapsed building in the southern city of Gaziantep, Anadolu reported.
Bekir Bozdag, Turkey’s justice minister, said on Sunday that legal proceedings against more than 130 people were underway over their apparent ties to collapsed buildings.
The death tolls in Turkey, where more than 31,600 people have died, and in northwestern Syria, where more than 3,500 people have died, have been steadily climbing ever since the 7.8-magnitude quake struck a week ago.
New York Times News Service
Survivors rescued but hopes fade
Rescuers in Turkey pulled out several people alive from collapsed buildings on Monday and were digging to reach a grandmother, mother and daughter from a single family.
With hopes of finding many more survivors in the rubble fast fading, the combined death toll in Turkey and neighbouring Syria from last Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake rose above 37,000 and looked set to keep increasing.
The rescue phase is “coming to a close”, with the focus now switching to providing shelter, food and schooling, UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said. But as he was speaking, teams in southeastern Turkey plucked more people from the rubble.
Officials said a young girl named Miray was rescued in Adiyaman 178 hours after the earthquake and a 35-yearold woman was also rescued in the same city.
A woman named Naide Umay was carried alive from a mess of crumbled masonry and twisted steel rods in Antakya, a video shared online by the mayor of Istanbul showed. Workers clapped as she was put in an ambulance.
Reuters
