{"id":56513,"date":"2023-02-15T11:51:12","date_gmt":"2023-02-15T19:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=56513"},"modified":"2023-02-15T11:51:12","modified_gmt":"2023-02-15T19:51:12","slug":"uncertainty-haunts-bay-area-turks-in-aftermath-of-turkish-syrian-earthquake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=56513","title":{"rendered":"Uncertainty Haunts Bay Area Turks in Aftermath of Turkish-Syrian Earthquake"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Members of the Bay Area’s Turkish community are grieving at the monumental loss of life and property in their home country. Many are also wondering what comes next.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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(Above: \u00a0Volunteers with the non-profit Empowering the Turkish Community<\/em>\u00a0in Santa Clara ready donated supplies to be sent to southeastern Turkey.)<\/em><\/p>\n

On Monday, February 6, around 4 a.m., a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria. A week later, the death toll has passed 25,000 with tens of thousands more injured and homeless amid the rubble of thousands of flattened buildings.<\/p>\n

Since news first broke early Sunday evening here, Bay Area members of the Turkish community have been reckoning with the death and destruction, and the accompanying uncertainty as the search for survivors continues.<\/p>\n

Hulya Koc, co-founder of Santa Clara-based nonprofit Empowering the Turkish Community (ETAC), affirmed that, by the end of that week, many of her friends\u2019 relatives were still under rubble, awaiting rescue. \u201cEach day brings greater certainty that they\u2019re dead, but some still hear screaming from buildings they pass.\u201d<\/p>\n

The epicenter was 14.2 miles north of Nurda\u011fi, a city in Gaziantep province, where southeastern Turkey borders northwestern Syria.\u00a0Aftershocks continued throughout the day and across the region, the strongest measuring 7.5 and coming just 9 hours after the original quake and 59 miles north of the epicenter.<\/a><\/p>\n

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An aerial view of the remnants of a house in Hatay, near the quake\u2019s epicenter.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThe was geologically unique for two reasons,\u201d Koc said. \u201cThe length of the fault line\u201d \u2014 it runs hundreds of miles, like the San Andreas fault which runs through the Bay Area \u2014 \u201cand the shallowness. The shaking was so close to the earth,\u00a0it had the effect of 130 atomic bombs<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The quake was as strong as the most powerful on record in Turkey,\u00a0which killed 30,000 people in December 1939<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While Koc is from\u00a0\u0130zmir<\/em>, a city on the Western coast, she frequently visited southeastern Turkey as a child and, as recently as 2019, toured almost all 10 affected provinces.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Erdo\u011fan declared a three-month state of emergency in these provinces. Governments worldwide are pledging assistance and deploying aid as thousands of rescue workers dig survivors and corpses from the rubble. The United States announced on Monday that it would deploy two specialized search-and-rescue teams of about 80 members each, one out of Los Angeles County and the other out of Fairfax County, Virginia.<\/p>\n

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An American search-and-rescue team en route to southeastern Turkey. (Courtesy of Hulya Koc)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cOn such a large scale,\u201d Koc said, \u201cgovernments alone can\u2019t help. When we want medical equipment at this point, we\u2019re not talking painkillers but body bags and generators \u2014 and we don\u2019t have infrastructure to distribute them. Most of the roads connecting these cities are wrecked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Monday, she has been collecting relief donations for rescue teams through an ETAC fundraiser. She has also been in contact with San Francisco staff, asking the county to send its own rescue team to the site.<\/p>\n

Akin Kele\u015f<\/em>, an engineer in Foster City has been following volunteer search-and-rescue teams online while his maternal cousins remained under rubble in Hatay, Turkey\u2019s southernmost and worst-hit province.<\/p>\n

Speaking on the difficulty these teams face in receiving supplies, he said, \u201cWe can\u2019t get help for the same reason we need it,\u201d said Kele\u015f<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s not a matter of infrastructure codes \u2014 many of the fallen buildings were new. Hatay Airport is new; the runway shattered in two. Landlines are down, there\u2019s no electricity, the internet is poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the first 17 hours,\u201d he said, \u201cour government narrowed internet bandwidth, restricted all the ways we were communicating \u2014 Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram.\u201d By 72 hours, \u201cwe had minimal organization. The Turkish army numbers 100,000; 3,000 were on the ground. I\u2019m surprised they accepted foreign teams at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using WhatsApp to talk to his four affected cousins, Kele\u015f<\/em>\u00a0learned that their building collapsed entirely. His father drove from his hometown to bring Kele\u015f<\/em>\u2019 aunt, uncle, and surviving young cousins to relative safety, 40 miles north. On the quake-torn roads, the drive took 7 and a half hours.<\/p>\n

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The remnants of the house in Hatay where Akin Kele\u015f\u2019 cousins resided. (Courtesy of Akin Kele\u015f)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Nour, a research scientist in San Francisco who declined to give her surname, had paternal family from Hatay as well. Her cousins extracted her elderly aunt and uncle from the rubble of their apartment in\u00a0Antakya, Hatay\u2019s capital<\/a>. Next door, her aunt\u2019s mother, sister-in-law, brother, and brother\u2019s kids all died except for one nephew whose condition remains unknown.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost everyone\u2019s home is destroyed,\u201d she said. \u201cOnly one of my cousins\u2019 homes is standing. Another of my cousin\u2019s wife and children died, while my other uncle\u2019s clothing store there was looted; people are that desperate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Kele\u015f<\/em>, Nour has struggled to message surviving family over Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram due to narrowed regional bandwidth. Some of her cousins are so certain that supplies won\u2019t arrive early enough to save those they know that they ask her not to send anything at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ll probably go to Istanbul where the rest of my cousins are,\u201d said Nour, \u201cbut it\u2019s unbelievable to lose everything overnight and know there\u2019s nothing we can do about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an engineer I understand the extent of this devastation,\u201d added Kele\u015f<\/em>, \u201cbut the uniqueness of Mother Nature\u2019s cruelty can\u2019t be ignored. All the professors on TV here say the same thing \u2014 this cannot be compared, geologically, to the earthquake which affected \u0130zmit , because it was so shallow.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the city of \u0130zmit in central Turkey was devastated, he said, \u201cTurkey established a very comprehensive set of rules to follow so this would never happen again.<\/a>\u00a0The human factor \u2014 the corruption that led the building codes, inspection methods, and organization rules that could have prevented this to remain in the books \u2014 cannot be ignored. What happened, happened; what next?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Feb 12, 2023 Members...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ca-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56514,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56513\/revisions\/56514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}