Another Strong Quake Rocks Eastern Turkey

Another strong earthquake struck eastern Turkey on Sunday, just two days after one that killed as many as 800 people and left 180,000 homeless. Panicked residents ran into the streets and power was knocked out.

The new shock came as tents and food aid poured into this city, a quarter of which was reduced to rubble by Friday’s earthquake. A government official said many of the collapsed buildings were poorly constructed or higher than the city’s three-story limit.

There were no immediate reports of casualties from Sunday’s quake, which was centered in Tunceli province and felt from the Soviet border to Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, the semiofficial Anatolia news agency reported.

The first quake left up to 800 people dead, according to Turkish figures cited Sunday by the Office of the U.N. Disaster Relief Coordinator in Geneva. Some relief officials said the toll could climb into the thousands as more bodies were recovered in remote areas.

Turkey also tripled its estimate of people left homeless to 180,000, the U.N. office said.

Search efforts in Erzincan concentrated on big buildings, most of which included restaurants full of people breaking the daylong fast observed during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Cranes lifted tons of concrete at the collapsed City Club, a five-story building where up to 200 people were thought to have been in the restaurants and tea houses.

“Since we don’t have enough heavy equipment, we have to set priorities based on the number of people,” said a policeman, Rifat Aksoy.

A score of doctors were still treating the injured in the open air Sunday, on cots set up in the mud outside the city’s damaged hospital.

Two survivors were dug out of the rubble Sunday, and rescuers said at least one and possibly two young women were still alive in a collapsed dormitory at a nursing school.

“Some have been found alive; there is still hope,” said Kurt Keller, a rescue specialist with Swiss Disaster Relief, which sent specially trained dogs to help the search.

But with temperatures below freezing, hope of finding many more people alive faded. Some families kept vigil outside a makeshift morgue, sagging against the building with sobs when they learned a loved one had died.

In the city’s cemetery, a stream of victims brought in by their families threatened to overwhelm gravediggers working frantically with shovels and backhoes.

“We cannot consider the grief of those around us,” said one mourner, Cafer Tosun. “It is enough only to mourn your own.”

In Erzurum, rescuers worked to free a man whose legs were pinned when part of a hospital collapsed minutes after his wife gave birth to their second daughter. Sait Celik’s wife and child were not injured.

The latest quake had a magnitude of 6 and occurred at 6:17 p.m., according to the Kandilli Observatory in Istanbul, Anatolia said.

Aslan Yildirim, the governor of Tunceli province, said Pulumur, a town of 6,000 people about 60 miles from Erzincan, was the hardest-hit Sunday. He said there were no known casualties, adding that residents had abandoned damaged buildings after Friday’s quake.

He said in a telephone interview that damage to buildings was heavy and landslides had closed the main roads into town.

Rescue efforts were proceeding slowly after Friday’s minute-long earthquake, which had a magnitude of 6.8.

Officials said that only about 300 bodies had been recovered by Sunday. They feared many bodies remain buried in this city of 150,000 people, which was rebuilt after a 1939 earthquake that killed 32,000.

Several newspapers on Sunday blamed faulty construction for the high death toll. State Minister Orhan Kilercioglu said an inquiry will be held.

Another state minister, Erman Sahin, told Anatolia that badly constructed buildings were part of the problem but also said the construction of structures too tall for the quake-prone region was a factor.

“For that reason, we will definitely not allow high-rise buildings when we prepare a development plan for the city,” Sahin said.

The newspaper Turcuman said that the numerous structures of four and five stories in Erzincan’s center were built illegally.