In Quake Area, Tears Amid the Rubble

The excavator stopped its noisy digging in the rubble of the city-run central market. Men with shovels stepped into the twisted wreckage as anxious faces in the crowd craned forward.

Then there rose another strangled wail in this week’s litany of grief in the earthquake-stricken city of Erzincan. Tears poured down the hardened peasant face of a man as he recognized the dust-encrusted body of his wife.

More than 480 bodies have now been recovered from scores of collapsed buildings in the center of this eastern Turkish city since the earthquake struck last Friday, officials say.

While the city is calmer and rescue efforts have turned to relief, normality has been slow to return. Tens of thousands are without proper roofs over their heads. Streets are strewn with rubble, few shops have opened, and banks and collapsed buildings are guarded by police and troops who warm themselves through the night with fires built from broken wooden beams.

Half of the population of 150,000 has fled, perhaps to relatives. Those who have stayed, fearing that a series of aftershocks signal more violence from beneath the snowbound mountains around the city, are camping in tents that now clog the side streets of this gray city.

“Tents, tents, tents. Everybody wants tents, whether they need them or not,” provincial Gov. Recep Yazicioglu complained to a group of petitioners after a crowd of hundreds besieged his office this week, demanding a faster flow of aid, his resignation and that of the government. “What we really need is a proper plan to rebuild the city with lightweight buildings.”

U.S. and British seismologists on the scene said the people’s instincts were right: An even bigger earthquake could come at any time. They said they themselves would not consider sleeping in a building until the aftershocks had quieted down much more.

“More than half the houses are uninhabitable. Many look all right but inside, their walls are cracked. All these will have to be pulled down,” said insurance assessor Fethi Cifter, sitting in a minibus from which the Turkish insurance company Aksigorta was busy paying out claims.

Villages around Erzincan, where about one-third of the fatalities occurred, are only just beginning to be assessed for damage and to receive aid. Many families are sleeping in the snow, and livestock has been especially badly hit.

In Erzincan itself, few doubt that municipal corruption was partly responsible for the gradual erosion of building controls that were supposed to restrict buildings to three stories. There is also the fact that this truck stop on the route from Europe to Iran is quite poor. “If you don’t have money, you build cheap and say God is merciful. But it can’t work like that,” the governor said.

The governor was not in Erzincan at the time of the earthquake; many officials were off for the weekend and others were desperately trying to safeguard their families, giving rise to a debate on how initial disaster relief should have been conducted.

Turkish, American, British, Swiss, French, Russian, Austrian, German and other national specialist teams all rushed to Erzincan, far faster than the U.N. Disaster and Relief Organization (UNDRO), whose theoretical coordinating presence was recognized mainly in evening meetings of relief agencies that started well after the real emergency was over.

With nighttime temperatures well below freezing and the daytime cold softened only by weak sunshine, nobody feels secure, and many young people said they just want to leave the city, whose name means “soul-crusher” in Turkish, a reference to its many earthquakes. One past quake leveled the city completely in 1939, killing 30,000 people.

One group of people not allowed to leave are the mainly ethnic Kurdish separatist inmates of Erzincan’s political prison.

The walls of the prison collapsed when the quake struck, and the prisoners made a break for the perimeter wire, but soldiers soon rounded them up.