Turkish Leader Nationalizes Relief Effort as Toll Rises

By RICHARD BOUDREAUX

Aug. 22, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ISTANBUL, Turkey —

Scrambling to gain control of a disjointed relief effort, the government requisitioned all private construction equipment, hearses and heavy trucks Saturday to speed removal of the dead and the wreckage left by Turkey’s monster earthquake.

The order came as the confirmed death toll reached 12,018 and governors of three of the nine quake-stricken provinces called off the search for possible survivors under thousands of collapsed buildings.

If enforced, the order would challenge a vast but chaotic effort by private volunteers stepping forward--some with forklifts and cranes--to save or assist victims of Tuesday’s quake who felt abandoned by the authorities.

Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, in his first televised address since the quake, defended the government’s sluggish rescue operation against angry grass-roots criticism. He said the priority now is to curb the spread of disease and shelter the homeless.

Condemning “negative and cruel” Turkish media scrutiny of official inaction, Ecevit said: “We will overcome this disaster, but we need to trust the strength of our nation and state and deal with the problems in unity.”

Army and civilian rescue teams were hindered for two days, he explained, because the magnitude 7.4 quake, centered 65 miles east of Istanbul, damaged communications and roads between Turkey’s stricken industrial heartland and the rest of the country.

“Acting speedily to limit the sudden losses of life caused by such a destructive earthquake so close to a densely populated area would surpass the power of any government,” the 74-year-old prime minister said.

With an estimated 30,000 quake victims still missing, U.N. officials say the death toll could well exceed 40,000. The disaster has caused billions of dollars in material damage and, Turkish commentators say, an erosion of public confidence in leaders of the Muslim world’s most Western-leaning democracy.

As of Saturday, many people in the quake zone said they had not seen any Turkish relief workers. They have been relying on untrained volunteers and hoping that some of the 2,200 search-and-rescue specialists sent here from 51 nations will show up to direct them. Some of those specialists have labeled Turkey’s relief effort wildly disorganized and sadly overwhelmed.

Compounding the sense of defeat, survivors of the quake in Izmit, the city at the epicenter, witnessed the stunning revival Saturday of an oil refinery blaze that the government said it had tamed two days earlier with a massive firefighting effort from land, air and sea.

The refinery’s general manager, Husamettin Danis, said the fire would probably continue for four or five days, but he claimed that it posed no threat to the city.

“The disaster has hurt us all deep in our hearts, but at least we have seen one thing clearly,” Ilnur Cevic, editor of the Turkish Daily News, wrote Saturday in a typical comment. “Our state system is in shambles and the authorities simply cannot hide their incompetence.”

Drawing his own lesson, Ecevit promised to set up a national earthquake early-warning agency and “emergency intervention” force based in Istanbul. He also vowed tighter enforcement of building codes and heavier punishment of violators.

Police in the city of Eskisehir, 70 miles south of Izmit, arrested three construction company owners and one architect to question them about slipshod building practices that led several tall apartment complexes to collapse in the quake.

The temblor struck at 3:02 a.m. as most of the victims slept. Ecevit said Saturday that 60,000 buildings collapsed or suffered irreparable damage. The U.N. estimated that up to 200,000 people were left homeless.

U.N. relief specialists said the quake spread its destruction over an unusually wide area, 175 miles long and 20 miles wide, from Istanbul east to Bolu and as far south as Bilecik, making it one of the century’s greatest in terms of range.

Breadth of Quake Zone Hinders Aid

In the Turkish government’s defense, the experts said the breadth of the stricken zone made it difficult to identify the hardest-hit areas quickly and rush help there.

“Not many Western European countries could have coped better under the circumstances,” said Jesper H. Lund of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Provincial governors in Bolu and Yalova, which is on the Marmara Sea, ordered an end to the search for survivors Saturday, and the governor of Sakarya province set a deadline of tonight. British and Dutch rescue teams were leaving Sakarya, where 3,046 corpses had been pulled from the rubble.

Authorities in those areas were eager to get on with the job of bulldozing and trucking away the rubble--a wholesale clearing that will expose more corpses and accelerate the confirmed death toll.

To that end, the government Wednesday declared the stricken provinces a disaster zone, paving the way for Saturday’s requisition order by the prime minister’s emergency quake task force.

The order requires all private institutions and companies to surrender their hearses, repair vehicles, excavators, loaders, bulldozers, cranes, trucks with capacities exceeding 12 tons “and other useful equipment” to local governors by tonight.

Officials said they were considering pouring lime on mounds of rubble and roads crossing through stricken areas to prevent outbreaks of disease and to stifle the stench of putrefying flesh, which has begun to attract rats.

Fearing typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery, government workers have been spraying disinfectants and distributing water purification tablets in some regions.

Time Running Out for Those Still Trapped

Lime would hamper rescue efforts, but some authorities argued that time is running out for those still trapped in the rubble.

“I would guess that, after tomorrow, any cases of survival will be miraculous and very few,” one relief official said Saturday night.

U.N. officials said rescuers pulled 10 people alive from the rubble Saturday, including a 9-year-old Israeli girl and a Turkish woman said to be 95. They had spent about 100 hours entombed.

The Israeli girl, whose mother had been rescued after spending 30 hours under the rubble, was lifted from the ruins of an apartment building in the seaside town of Cinarcik, 30 miles south of Istanbul. Search teams had recovered the body of her twin brother, but her father and grandparents were still buried and presumed dead.

Some of the tens of thousands of missing are thought to be alive and out of danger yet unable to contact relatives because of damaged telephone lines. To help survivors locate missing relatives, Turkish television stations were flashing on screen the names of people being treated in various hospitals.

Newspapers began printing the names and hometowns of the dead Saturday in long black columns of type that filled entire pages. In the city of Golcuk, gravediggers lowered scores of nameless bodies, wrapped in white shrouds, into trenches dug by bulldozers, as white-robed imams recited Muslim prayers, covering their mouths and noses against the intense smell.

The scale of the disaster made it impossible to identify all the victims. Bodies were photographed and fingerprinted before being buried, so that relatives might identify them later.

Pits were marked with slender wooden planks. One read: “16 adults, 1 baby.”

For the living, the government is building tent cities. About 19,000 tents have been set up in the disaster zone, and the U.N. says it will supply most of the 20,000 more that are needed.

Most survivors who lost their homes have put up their own makeshift tents--often blankets thrown over poles or branches--in parks and other open spaces. Turkey’s soccer federation offered its training field in Istanbul to house the homeless and also announced a three-week break in play for the nation’s most popular sport.

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How to Help

These aid agencies are among the many accepting contributions for assistance to victims of the earthquake in Turkey. For a more complete list, please see The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/turkeyaid.

Direct Relief International

Turkey Relief Fund

27 S. La Patera Lane

Santa Barbara, CA 93117

Tel: (800) 676-1638

www.directrelief.org

International Aid

17011 W. Hickory St.

Spring Lake, MI 49456

Tel: (800) 251-2502

www.internationalaid.org

Jewish Joint Distribution