When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey, the apartment building that Halize Sen once lived in collapsed like a “tower of cards”, burying her neighbors under nine floors of concrete. X. Shen, head of the local chamber of architects, inspects the wreckage. “There is no reinforcing steel here,” he says, “so the concrete caved in and the columns collapsed along with the ceilings when the ground shook.”

According to her husband Mustafa, a former contractor, none of the buildings in these neighborhoods had basements. Buildings with such weak foundations were doomed to fall in a strong earthquake, he comments. Mustafa, who now grows olives and walnuts, retired from the construction industry many years ago. other contractors ignored building regulations. “If we used 100 tons of iron in a building, they used 90 tons,” he says. Osmaniye is located near an active fault. “I knew we were on the brink of disaster,” he adds.

And the disaster came on February 6 with two earthquakes measuring 7.8 and 7.6 on the Richter scale, respectively. They are the deadliest in modern Turkish history.. Thousands of buildings were demolished in the earthquake-hit area, which stretches from the Mediterranean coast to the Kurdish southeast. Some of them had more than 12 floors. At least 31,600 people died in Turkey alone. In Syria, the death toll has exceeded 5,700.

More than 30,000 Turkish rescuers, along with local residents and rescue teams from dozens of other countries, fight day and night to find survivors. “Miracles happen. Six days after the earthquake, a child was pulled out of the rubble. Turkish firefighters, miners and construction workers are helping where they can, clearing the rubble and offering help, food and other essentials.

Fears that tens of thousands of people are still under the rubble

“But the rescue effort is increasingly like a massive excavation,” says the Economist. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people remain buried under the rubble. If the hypothesis is correct, then most of these people will probably be dead. In Kahramanmaras, a city of more than 500,000 people, smoke from fires caused by the earthquake (or started by locals trying to keep warm in the cold) envelopes “hills” of rubble that cover entire blocks of buildings. Smoke, accompanied by the stench of death, covers Antiyaman, about 100 kilometers to the east. “Kurdish relatives hug and cry as rescuers retrieve the five dead members of their family. The woman faints,” describes the Economist.

Millions of people are left homeless and sleeping in tents provided by the country’s emergency services. Others are housed in mosques, schools, libraries or in their cars. Few dare to enter their homes, even those that seem untouched by earthquakes. Some have nowhere to go. Mehmet, a clergyman in Antiyaman, sleeps on a tarp-covered garage floor with 20 of his relatives. More than 30 members of his extended family are dead.