Ruins in Turkey Thought to Trap Many Thousands

With the odds of their survival dwindling by the hour, tens of thousands of people were believed to be still trapped Friday under the wreckage of an earthquake that has caused 10,204 confirmed deaths and could end up as the worst of the century for this tremor-prone country.

As the huge scale of Tuesday’s tragedy grew clearer, disembodied voices continued to issue faint cries from beneath tons of fallen concrete in shattered cities across Turkey’s northwest industrial heartland, summoning rescuers who managed to pull some of the victims out alive.

Rescue efforts aided by 50,000 Turkish soldiers and 2,000 specialists from two dozen other countries intensified as the weekend approached in the belief that few of those trapped can endure much longer.

Sergio Piazzi of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva said Friday that Turkish authorities had privately informed his agency that as many as 35,000 people could still be buried in the stricken zone, which stretches east from Istanbul for 80 miles along the Marmara Sea.

Since that estimate, more than 3,000 of those buried have been pulled out dead, with corpses far outnumbering those saved.

Turkey’s calculation is based on population density figures and aerial surveys of thousands of collapsed buildings, Piazzi said. Most of the 20 million Turks who live in the disaster zone were asleep when the magnitude 7.4 quake struck at 3:02 a.m.

Publicly, Turkish officials have been reluctant to go beyond their known body count, which grows by the hour, and they would not confirm the estimate announced by the U.N.

But one Turkish official said the presumed death toll was “horrendous,” and Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit predicted that it would surpass the 30,000 killed in what was modern Turkey’s deadliest quake, which struck the eastern city of Erzincan in 1939.

“To my knowledge, this is the worst disaster that Turkey has known,” Ecevit told reporters in Ankara, the Turkish capital.

The quake will exact a huge toll on Turkey’s economy, which had been struggling under demands by international lenders to slash public investment and spending. The Central Bank governor, Gazi Ercel, said the disaster might cost $5 billion to $7 billion. Unofficial estimates range to as high as $25 billion.

A quake-induced fire that was brought under control Thursday devastated the country’s largest oil refinery, at Izmit, and cost Turkey more than one-third of its overall refining capacity. Officials issued an appeal against fuel hoarding and price gouging.

Despite the destruction, oil industry experts said the country should have no problem quickly replacing the lost gasoline and other refined products, as there is a glut of refining capacity in the Mediterranean region and the Middle East.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, scrapped plans to send four Air Force transport planes to Turkey to help fight fires triggered by the earthquake. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the planes were no longer needed.

President Clinton, however, ordered James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Harriet C. Babbitt, deputy administrator of the Agency for International Development, to visit Turkey and determine how the United States can assist in disaster relief and reconstruction, White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said. Lockhart spoke from Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where Clinton is vacationing.

Beyond the economic damage, Turkey faced more immediate problems restoring order and public services to the disaster zone. Living conditions there worsened Friday and tensions rose, unabated by a largely spontaneous relief effort that seemed in some places to deliver mainly chaos.

Here in Golcuk, where the quake wrecked nearly every building and made an entire city of 75,000 people homeless, the air reeked of garbage and decaying corpses Friday. The stench and the cement dust and the 95-degree heat brought out the best and the worst of human nature.

The highway into the city was backed up for miles, clogged by private citizens driving in to help. But they brought far more bread than the locals could consume and little of what was really needed--portable toilets, generators and tents.

“The government is doing nothing at all” for quake victims, said Durmus Sezer, 42, who closed his tire shop in Bursa, filled his van with $500 worth of bread and cheese, and made the four-hour drive north to give the food away. “The citizens are much more dynamic than the government.”

But hundreds of vehicles like Sezer’s blocked ambulance lanes, prompting another kind of citizen initiative--a menacing force of self-appointed, club-swinging traffic cops.

Wearing surgical masks against noxious fumes and stench, these muscular young men leaped in front of oncoming traffic waving baseball bats and metal rods to free a space for emergency vehicles. Ugly confrontations brewed all day along Ataturk Boulevard, the city’s main drag.

A French-led rescue team, joined by volunteers from a Turkish cave explorers club, worked several hours Friday to break through a mound of rubble beside the boulevard and lift Ahmet and Sema Bulte, alive and apparently well, from what was once their home.

Trapped in a tiny crawl space, Ahmet Bulte, a 34-year-old pharmacist, had managed to find and use his cellular phone to call for help late Thursday, his brother said.

Hungarian, Russian, Austrian and Israeli specialists performed equally painstaking and dramatic rescues.

“There are still reports of people hearing voices in the rubble,” said Steve Catlin, rescue coordinator with the Agency for International Development’s foreign disaster assistance office. “This gives us pause for hope.”

The U.N.’s Piazzi said there was “a very high chance to find many people” alive in the rubble as late as Monday or Tuesday.

Piazzi explained that Turkey’s use in construction of large concrete slabs that hold together gave people a better chance of surviving--odds that he said are further improved by the warm summer weather.

However, other specialists said the risk of dehydration made it difficult for anyone to survive more than 72 hours in the Turkish heat, and that deadline passed Friday morning.

In a grim scene far more common than the successful rescues, a flatbed truck moved around Golcuk on Friday collecting sheet-shrouded corpses pulled from the rubble.

Ecevit ordered his government to accelerate burials to prevent the spread of disease. Turkey asked the U.N. for 10,000 body bags.

In Adapazari, 80 miles east of Istanbul, government workers buried 963 people in a mass grave after taking pictures of the dead so they could later be identified by families.

“We are burying all the bodies as fast as we can,” said Golcuk Mayor Ismail Baris. “I don’t think we are going to have any kind of epidemic.”

Foreign doctors said they were more worried about crushed pipes that have deprived the quake zone of running water and sewage facilities. They listed dysentery, diarrhea, gastroenteritis and typhoid as immediate threats. Rescue workers were being inoculated against typhoid.

The threat of a new calamity hung over Turkey after its top seismologist, Ahmet Mete Isikara, late Thursday announced unusual seismic activity and warned of a possible new quake.

In Istanbul, Ankara and other cities, panicked Turks grabbed food and bedsheets and spent the night on the streets. In Bursa province, the governor’s office ordered hotels not to accept guests. Some hospitals moved their patients outdoors.

Early Friday, after meeting with other experts, Isikara revised his forecast and said he no longer expected a second quake. But still uneasy, he told a television interviewer: “If it was up to me, I would stay outside.”

A mild aftershock of magnitude 4.3 hit at 3:03 a.m. Friday, followed by one of magnitude 4.6 around noon. Dozens of similar temblors have shaken western Turkey since Tuesday’s quake, but no significant damage was reported.

As the government appealed for calm, Turks debated the wisdom of Isikara’s warning.

“He did the right thing,” the Sabah newspaper commented. “He took the most important decision of his career and sent us out onto the streets. In the same situation, what would you have done?”

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and Chris Kraul in San Diego contributed to this report.

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