The earth shook again on Monday evening in Turkey and Syria. A new earthquake of 6.4 on the Richter scale hit the country on Monday evening. A new seismic activity sixteen days after the earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 which hit Turkey and Syria on February 6, killing more than 45,000 people to date.
Two strong earthquakes (6.4 and 5.8) again shook northern Syria and the Turkish province of Hatay (south) on Monday evening, the most affected by last week’s historic earthquake. There are at least three dead in Turkey, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu announced in the evening. The Vice President, Fuat Oktay, had previously reported eight people injured by falling buildings already damaged.
In Syria, 47 people were injured in Aleppo, caught in a panic as they tried to flee, reported the Sana agency. The head of the group of Syrian rescuers of the White Helmets spoke to him of 125 wounded in the north of the country. The first quake, of magnitude 6.4 and with epicenter Defne, a district near Antakya, occurred at 8:04 p.m. (17:04 GMT) and was very violently felt by AFP teams in Antakya and Adana, 200 km further north.
It was followed three minutes later by a new earthquake of magnitude 5.8 in Samandag, a coastal locality further south. According to the Turkish relief agency Afad, at least two other earthquakes of magnitude 5.2 occurred in the evening. “Aftershocks along the Anatolian fault” and not new “independent earthquakes”, said Dr. Övgün Ahmet Ercan, engineer specializing in geophysics.
Iskenderum Port Public Hospital and Mustafa Kemal University Hospital in Antakya were evacuated as a precaution, DHA news agency reported, and intensive care patients transferred to a field hospital. The Afad relief coordination center was also evacuated.
According to Afad, more than 6,000 aftershocks have been recorded since the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated southern Turkey and Syria.
There are no casualties yet, but heavy material damage, reports the Turkish television channel TRT Haber.
This new tremor was followed three minutes later by a new tremor of magnitude 5.8 in Samandag, a coastal town south of Antakya, reported Afad, which fears “a rise in sea level up to 50cm”. The tremors were also felt in the region of Aleppo, in northwestern Syria, reported AFP correspondents on the spot who saw the panicked population leaving their homes and going out into the streets.
“The Earth Opening Up”
In a square in the center of Antakya, Ali Mazloum, an 18-year-old Syrian, testified to AFP about the intensity of this earthquake. “We were with Afad, which is looking for the bodies of our relatives when the earthquake surprised us. You don’t know what to do,” he said. “We grabbed each other and right in front of us the walls started to come down. It felt like the earth was opening up to swallow us up.”
Not far away, a backhoe loader with full headlights was busy clearing an avenue of two lanes, covered with rubble. “This one just fell,” a rescuer told AFP, pointing to the remains of a collapsed building. An AFP journalist saw and heard several sections of the walls of already badly damaged buildings crumble and several people, apparently injured, calling for help.
Ali, who has lived in Antakya for twelve years, is still looking for the bodies of his sister and her family, as well as those of his brother-in-law and his family who disappeared fourteen days ago.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled on Monday to the province of Hatay, bordering Syria, one of the eleven southern provinces of Turkey affected by the earthquake of February 6 and one of only two with Kahramanmaras where research and excavations continue. The Turkish authorities arrested them everywhere else on Sunday and the hope of finding survivors is practically non-existent after fourteen days. According to the Head of State, more than 118,000 buildings have been destroyed or seriously damaged.
Afad assures that more than 6,000 aftershocks have been recorded since the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated southern Turkey and Syria exactly two weeks ago.