Oil Refinery Fire Rages as Quake Toll Tops 4,000

A fire ignited by a monstrous earthquake burned out of control at Turkey’s biggest oil refinery Wednesday, prompting tens of thousands of people to flee this industrial suburb where about 300 victims remained trapped under flattened buildings.

As the confirmed death toll in Tuesday’s quake topped 4,000, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said the fire engulfing seven storage tanks at the seaside refinery posed the greatest risk of compounding the tragedy in the country’s devastated industrial heartland.

Firefighting aircraft from Turkey and the United States swooped low into a thick plume of black smoke to drop chemical foam on the blaze, which threatened to engulf the entire field of 30 storage tanks containing 700,000 tons of crude oil and blow up an adjacent fertilizer plant holding 8,000 tons of dangerous ammonia.

“We’re trying to cope with three disasters at once--an earthquake, a fire and a blackout,” said Husamettin Danis, the plant’s exhausted general manager, after a midafternoon explosion announced the spread of wind-whipped flames to another tank and smoke darkened the coastline for six miles.

Power shortages, he said, had limited the plant’s ability to pump seawater onto the flames.

Residents began abandoning the suburb on the regional governor’s orders late Tuesday, leaving a minority to brave the danger and continue mining the rubble of collapsed homes for any sign of loved ones.

Their lonely search underlined a wider feeling of frustration among Turks with a government that was ill prepared for the disaster and only beginning to cope, with help from more than 1,000 foreign specialists arriving from 19 countries.

“I know there could be an explosion and I could be killed, but I have to find my brother and his family,” said Lokman Cakir, who was searching the ruins of a five-story apartment building here with about a dozen neighbors.

Working with their hands in the scorching heat a few blocks from the burning refinery, the private search party pulled four survivors from the wreckage Wednesday morning. But no further sign of life was evident in the rubble, where Cakir’s brother, sister-in-law and two nephews remained buried.

“Look at my hands,” said Deligoz Karen, another member of the search party, displaying raw wounds on his palms. “We’re working alone. What has the state done? Nothing! Nothing but talk.”

“There is no state,” a neighbor said bitterly.

Similar expressions of helplessness--relieved by occasional celebrations of miraculous rescue--were heard in seven Turkish provinces along an 80-mile stretch of the Marmara Sea from Istanbul to Golcuk, a heavily populated industrial corridor jolted by the quake at 3:02 a.m. Tuesday.

The temblor, which was downgraded Wednesday to magnitude 7.4 from an earlier estimate of 7.8, was centered on the city of Izmit, 65 miles east of Istanbul, and its industrial suburbs, including this oil refining city of 100,000 people.

The magnitude of human tragedy, in one of modern Turkey’s worst natural disasters, was harder to gauge. The confirmed death toll grew by the hour as layer upon layer of flattened homes yielded new corpses, which overflowed hospital morgues and were laid in mosques, ice skating rinks and refrigerated meat trucks. The toll included more than 18,000 injured.

In Golcuk alone, Mayor Ismail Baris estimated that 10,000 of the city’s 75,000 people were buried in rubble--a sign that the number of confirmed dead could multiply in the days ahead.

Still, there was hope of finding more people alive.

In a dramatic scene aired on Turkish television, rescuers pulled 6-year-old Akin Sirnen, stunned and dust-caked, from the ruins of a house in Golcuk, southwest of Izmit, on Wednesday afternoon. Then they fought on with picks and sledgehammers into the night, still hoping to save his parents and sister buried below.

“I saw lots of dreams in there. It was so dark,” Metin Sirnen, his uncle, quoted the boy as saying following his rescue 36 hours after the quake.

Bystanders applauded as a firefighter delivered Akin into the shaking, outstretched arms of an aunt, who wrapped him in a sheet and took him, barely conscious, to a hospital.

Some Golcuk residents complained that rescue efforts were focused far more on collapsed buildings at a Turkish naval base, where at least 160 sailors and officers were reported killed and as many as 80 still trapped in the rubble.

“My loves, my children are there, my 15-year-old son and my daughter. But no one is fighting to save them,” Gulser Onat complained, pointing at the debris of the family apartment in Golcuk.

The international community responded swiftly to Turkey’s pleas for help. The International Committee of the Red Cross launched an appeal for $6.92 million in assistance, the European Union said it was sending $2.1 million, and countries across the globe offered money and technical help.

Three U.S. Navy ships with 2,100 Marines were ordered Wednesday to head for the Aegean Sea to provide humanitarian aid. The three ships--the Kearsarge, the Ponce and the Gunston Hall--have about 630 beds, six operating rooms, five X-ray rooms, eight doctors, 88 medical corpsmen and 22 helicopters.

But despite the aid, Turkish newspapers and many mayors complained that lifesaving assistance--from the central government in the capital, Ankara, and abroad--was too little and perhaps too late.

“We need more rescue teams,” said Izmit Mayor Sefa Sirmen. “We need at least 250 teams because that is the number of buildings that have been destroyed.”

Ecevit, the prime minister, took a helicopter tour of the region and said rescue workers had not yet reached many quake-hit areas because of damaged roads.

That was no excuse here in Korfez, an easy two-hour drive from Istanbul. Government trucks arrived Wednesday morning with 80,000 loaves of bread, five vats of hot beef stew and wholesale quantities of olive oil, noodles and cheese--a good start on feeding the tens of thousands forced from their homes.

But residents said there had been no organized effort by the central government or foreigners to find people still trapped in the rubble of the city’s 150 flattened residential buildings.

“There’s a lot of anger here toward the state,” said Erhan Yenilmez, a 47-year-old teacher who was elected mayor of Korfez in April. “I have spent most of my time since the earthquake trying to calm people down, trying to explain something I don’t understand--why they’re not getting any help.”

Turkey has a highly centralized government, which limits the taxing authority and other powers of local authorities. As a result, municipalities lack trained civil defense teams and have had to wait for expert help to be dispatched on orders from faraway Ankara.

The mayor said he was stunned by the order of the Ankara-appointed provincial governor to evacuate his suburb even as untrained local volunteers were frantically searching for quake survivors.

Most of the suburb’s residents fled up switchback trails into the steep hills above town late Tuesday, walking or driving to impromptu campgrounds where they spent an anxious night watching the firefighting effort and listening to news on transistor radios.

Police blocked others from entering the evacuation zone.

“I didn’t challenge the order. That would have risked the lives of people near the refinery,” the mayor said. “But it had a negative effect on our rescue efforts. I am certain that, as a result of this order, we lost some people who might have been saved. We are still hearing screams down there” under the rubble.

The mayor camped Tuesday night with evacuees in the hills above the city, then used a megaphone to round up about 100 volunteers to come down Wednesday morning and rejoin the search effort.

By late afternoon, he received a promising sign of outside help when a Turkish army colonel arrived with 90 soldiers to lead the rescue effort.

In the smoke-blackened sky above, firefighting planes intensified their assault on the soaring orange flames at the refinery, abandoning a strategy to let them burn themselves out. Israeli, French and German pilots were joining the effort, Turkish officials said.

The fire, which started at three tanks of flammable naphtha after a crude-oil tower collapsed during the quake, burned for three hours before firefighters arrived, the mayor said.

“Time was lost in getting our teams to the refinery,” said Danis, the refinery manager. “If you’re not there in the first five minutes, it becomes a bit late.”

Associated Press contributed to this report.

Updates on the earthquake are available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com.