Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Feb 8: The death toll in Turkey and Syria reaches 8000. Around 5,894 people are confirmed dead in Turkey, while 1,932 people have died in Syria, taking the total death toll to 7,826. There are fears that the toll will rise inevitably as World Health Organization officials estimating up to 20,000 may have died.
Search and rescue efforts continue in the wreckage of the destroyed buildings in Turkey. Aftershocks, freezing temperatures and damaged roads are hampering efforts to undertake the enormous humanitarian emergency triggered by Monday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake in southern Turkey and northern Syria, with 7,800 people now confirmed dead and 380,000 others seeking refuge in Turkey alone.
Rescuers in Turkey and Syria battled bitter cold Tuesday in a race against time to find survivors under buildings flattened by the earthquake that killed more than 7,800 people.
As the scale of the devastation from the initial quake and a second tremor became clearer, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday declared a three-month state of emergency in 10 southeastern provinces as World Health Organization warned that the number of fatalities could exceed 20,000.
By Tuesday evening, the death toll had passed 7,800. In Turkey, 5,894 people were confirmed dead and around 32,000 had been injured. The death toll in Syria rose to 1,932 on Tuesday night.
Washington and the European Commission said on Monday that humanitarian programmes supported by them were responding to the destruction in Syria.
Dozens of nations including the United States, China and the Gulf States have pledged to help, and search teams as well as relief supplies have begun to arrive by air. Yet people in some of the hardest-hit areas said they felt they had been left to fend for themselves.
A winter storm has compounded the misery by rendering many roads, some of them damaged by the quack, almost impassable, resulting in traffic jams that stretch for kilometres in some regions. The cold rain and snow are a risk both for people forced from their homes who took refuge in mosques, schools or even bus shelters and survivors buried under debris.
Turkey is in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones.
The country’s last 7.8-magnitude tremor was in 1939, when 33,000 died in the eastern Erzincan province. The Turkish region of Duzce suffered a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in 1999, when more than 17,000 people died.
Experts have long warned a large quake could devastate Istanbul, a megalopolis of 16 million people filled with rickety homes.
