Turkey and Northern Syria Hit by Multiple Earthquakes

[Moonface]

Turkey and Northern Syria Hit By Multiple 7+ Magnitude Earthquakes
Multiple earthquakes have struck Turkey and northern Syria overnight measuring at 7.8 and 7.5 magnitudes respectively, with tremors felt in various Turkish cities, including the capital Ankara, as well as in neighbouring countries like Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

• The first quake struck near Gaziantep at 4:17am local time (1:17am GMT), with a magnitude of 7.8 and a depth of 17.9km (11 miles).
  
• An aftershock occurred 11 minutes later with a magnitude of 6.7.
  
• There were more than 40 aftershocks in total according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority.
  
• The earthquake occurred around a region of instability called the East Anatolian fault, which runs south-west to north-west of the south-eastern border of Turkey.
  
• At 1:24pm local time (10:24am GMT) a second earthquake struck in the Elbistan district of Turkey's Kahramanmaras province, which is located 80 miles directly north of Gaziantep. This quake had a magnitude of 7.5.
  
• Current casualty reports: Turkey (1500+ killed, 5300+ wounded), Syria (810+ killed, 2000+ wounded)
  

The best place to keep up to date with things that I found was the live thread on the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/64533954
Most other sites I went to were putting this stuff behind paywalls which I'm not going to support.

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I was awake reading about the first earthquake when the second one hit, but I wasn't even aware of a second one until an hour ago. I've seen some footage on Twitter of the first one hitting and some of the apartment buildings just drop like a stack of paper. Apparently there's a large amount of buildings in Turkey that never get finished because it means taxes don't have to be paid on the building, but people still move into them regardless because a roof is a roof.

I doubt the death toll will sit below 15,000 once casualty numbers start getting confirmed at a greater rate as debris gets cleared and rescue efforts get larger once help from other countries arrives. And not to try and put any one country on a pedestal here but I can't believe Ukraine is going to be giving aid while they're in the middle of fighting a war against Russia.

[ShiraNoMai]

Yeah what a horrible disaster. When the earth decides to fuck you up, it don't fuck around, man. Woof. So unfortunate it's in such a densely populated region. What a huge loss, and how scary it must be to be alive and trapped under rubble. My boss was telling me people were livestreaming their experiences before being saved.

[Mr EliteL]

Freaking hell, damn an Earthquake disaster. RIP all those who have lost their lives to such an unfortunate event.

[Dragon Lord]

Just heard on the news as I was passing through the living room that the confirmed death toll so far is over 11,000 with a lot to still go through yet.

[Moonface]

So unfortunate it's in such a densely populated region.

It wasn't helped it happened in the dead of night when most people were indoors asleep. Had it happened during the day things might have turned out significantly different.

Just heard on the news as I was passing through the living room that the confirmed death toll so far is over 11,000 with a lot to still go through yet.

Yeah, broken down the toll is 8,574 deaths in Turkey and 2,660 in Syria. I'll be surprised if the number doesn't stay below 20,000 considering there's so much wreckage to still search through.

[Moonface]

Just heard on the news as I was passing through the living room that the confirmed death toll so far is over 11,000 with a lot to still go through yet.

Yeah, broken down the toll is 8,574 deaths in Turkey and 2,660 in Syria. I'll be surprised if the number doesn't stay below 20,000 considering there's so much wreckage to still search through.

Well, it was barely more than 36 hours since these posts yesterday and now the number of deaths has officially surpassed 20,000. Apparently aftershocks are still happening in huge numbers, and search efforts amongst the rubble are still ongoing although hope to find survivors is getting slim with how much time has passed now. Worse still is the weather conditions and lack of food, water and shelter puts anyone who did survive at risk of serious illness or even death from hypothermia. I can't imagine surviving the initial quakes if you were rescued from under the rubble only to now face the possibility of dying from the aftermath conditions. I just hope it doesn't get so bad that people there start wishing they had passed in the initial quakes.

[Dragon Lord]

I'm not surprised the death toll has risen that high. I was talking to my mother about it last night, saying that with how fast it got to 10,000+ already, I fully expect the number to be, at the absolute minimum, 30,000 deaths.

[Moonface]

With the current death toll combined with the number of injured it sits at somewhere like 100,000 people, which feels significantly low when the area that was ground zero for the first earthquake has a population of 2+ million. Although, looking at a breakdown of numbers by province Gaziantep has about 2k fatalities while others are at 3k or even 5k, so maybe the main city had better infrastructure so less buildings collapsed or it's just so bad over there that rescue efforts are harder and slower so the numbers aren't as high as areas further away yet.

I still think the worst part of all this is how many people died who didn't have to if not for the Turkish building laws that encouraged numerous buildings to remain unfinished and not as stable or safe as they perhaps could have been. It's just such stupid negligence.

[Moonface]

I fully expect the number to be, at the absolute minimum, 30,000 deaths.

Currently the number of confirmed deaths sits at 33,000+.

And not that this remotely makes up for such a substantial loss of life, but 113 arrest warrants have been issued in connection with the construction of buildings that collapsed in Monday's earthquake. It should really include any politician who passed policies that allowed "so-called amnesties for contractors who swerved building regulations, in order to encourage a construction boom" because if they hadn't passed that policy, it wouldn't have encouraged the behaviour in the first place.

[Mr EliteL]

Oh good something is happening to punish those that left the buildings inadequately built to avoid tax, also hope that includes whomever went ahead with the policy. Honestly thought nothing was.

[Dragon Lord]

I heard on the news earlier this morning that the number is already over 42,000 now. Also saw a story that they found two guys alive after being trapped for over... 220 hours, I think? That's a crazy amount of time to be buried under there with no food or water and still come out of it alive. Obviously they aren't the only ones being found after that long, but it was just the story featured on the news. If you Google it, you'll find a lot of stories, including a 77-year old woman who was found after 220+ hours as well.

[Moonface]

I was curious where 42,000+ deaths stands in respect to most deaths caused by a natural disaster, and I expected to find that it was going to be pretty high up there but was shocked to find it wouldn't even break into the top ten over the last 50 years. It's actually scary to think that for as awful as 42,000+ deaths is, it isn't even close to the worst that nature can do and here I was thinking that 42,000+ felt like an unfathomable number to see for any natural disaster.

As for the stories of survivors still being found, if all of them lacked food and water during that entire period that's already impressive to still find them alive, but more so when you consider that the weather conditions in Turkey have been so cold there were concerns that already rescued survivors could die of illnesses such as hypothermia, so the people under the rubble had to contend with that too. Maybe they were lucky and the compact nature of the rubble helped to retain some heat or something.

[Dragon Lord]

It just goes to show you that no matter how technologically advanced we get, nature can always wipe us out. Even places that are built to sustain an earthquake, like places in California, would fall to ruins if a big enough quake hit. Experts always say that if the "big one" (the San Andreas Fault) ever comes, nothing will save a lot of California from it, and the east coast would be able to feel rumblings from it.

Or the Yellowstone Super Volcano, just as another example off the top of my head. Earth has a lot of ways just to say, "Aight, ya'll are done, I'm hitting the reset button."

[Moonface]

It just goes to show you that no matter how technologically advanced we get, nature can always wipe us out. Even places that are built to sustain an earthquake, like places in California, would fall to ruins if a big enough quake hit. Experts always say that if the "big one" (the San Andreas Fault) ever comes, nothing will save a lot of California from it, and the east coast would be able to feel rumblings from it.

Estimates of the effects of a 7.8 earthquake on California today put the death toll at about 1800, and hopefully those predictions are correct since that to me feels like an incredibly low number considering the number of people living there and the fault lines they sit upon. It might go lower eventually though since "officials in Los Angles County voted Wednesday to update the county's building code and require all non-ductile high-rises to be retrofitted within 10 years". Source

As for Yellowstone though it seems we can't do a thing to mitigate that if it ever erupts, since it would affect things on a global scale. At least for that one it doesn't look like we'll ever see it happen in our lifetimes.

[ShiraNoMai]

Earth's tectonic plates are fickle creatures. Being anywhere near a plate division is just a really scary place to be. You can at least predict hurricanes and other weather events to strike but things of that nature are next to impossible to predict.