Sad Turks Leave ‘Dead’ Cities

Fed up with rain-soaked mattresses and fearing epidemics, tens of thousands of Turks have begun an exodus from earthquake-devastated cities, leaving behind ghost towns that could take years to rebuild.

“This is a dead city,” Ferhat Basturk, deputy provincial governor in Izmit, a metropolitan area of more than 1 million, said Monday. “People are deeply wounded spiritually and psychologically. Houses are empty. No businesses are open.”

Authorities are struggling to aid hundreds of thousands of victims of last Tuesday’s killer quake. But the sad-faced crowds at bus stations and dark rows of abandoned apartments signal the widespread hopelessness and misery a week after the temblor cut a 175-mile-long swath of destruction from Istanbul eastward.

“I don’t know how many years it will take to rebuild. I’ll return when it’s normal,” said Fehmi Kazan, 65, a white-capped farmer perched on a box at the bus station Monday in Izmit, awaiting a 16-hour ride back to Erzurum in eastern Turkey. He had moved last spring to be near his five children. But they all were now living in tents after the quake destroyed their homes in Golcuk, a devastated coastal town.

One survivor was pulled alive from the rubble on Monday--a 4-year-old boy who had been trapped for 146 hours in Cinarcik, 30 miles south of Istanbul.

Making matters worse for the homeless and rescue workers on Monday was a driving rain that turned tent camps into seas of mud and made debris heavier and more difficult to move.

Early today, the government’s main crisis center put the number of dead at 14,360 and the number of injured at 43,873, according to the state-run Anatolian news agency.

U.N. officials have estimated that the quake may have killed 40,000 people, and Turkey asked the United Nations on Monday to help find 45,000 body bags, said Sergio Piazzi, head of the European desk at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in Geneva.

The pace of the cleanup is expected to pick up now, though it may still take weeks. One reason is that police inspectors must gather evidence from the ruins so that prosecutors can go after builders who violated construction codes.

“We are shifting from the search and rescue phase to the acute emergency phase,” said Piazzi. “But still we have hope to find some individuals alive.”

But foreign rescue teams began to leave Turkey as hopes dimmed of finding more survivors, and the government turned its attention to caring for the living.

It faces a gargantuan task.

Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. Many, though, were not waiting around for government assistance. Exhausted by sleeping outdoors and angry at the chaotic official disaster response, they packed their few belongings and jammed bus stations like the one in Izmit, 65 miles east of Istanbul.

“There’s no water, no electricity. We have babies in our family. We can’t stay,” said Fatma Cetin, 43, a grandmother in a blue-flowered head scarf, sitting with her daughter, son and husband amid a pile of giant trash bags stuffed with the family’s belongings. They were waiting for a bus to her brother’s house in Adana, 11 hours to the southeast. Another son and daughter-in-law, she said, would follow with their two infants.

“My brother also left. My relatives left. Everyone is going,” said Cetin, her eyes welling with tears. “Maybe I’ll be back in a year.”

Bus companies were scrambling to add vehicles after many of their runs sold out.

“They’re all full. All the private cars and small trucks have been leaving the city too,” said Hasan Sen, a ticket seller.

Similar scenes occurred in other parts of the quake zone. In Adapazari, a city farther east where about 70% of the housing was damaged, thousands have fled in recent days.

At a makeshift tent city in Golcuk, dozens of families who had lost their homes prepared to leave. People tossed their bags into the backs of trucks, or hitched rides to the bus station.

“This town is finished,” said Kenan Kandemir, whose restaurant and home were destroyed. “I have spent 16 years of my life building my home and business here, but I am not going to sit and wait for this place to recover.”

Kandemir said he was going with 12 family members to Eskisehir, a city in west-central Turkey. Like many people in the tents, he placed no faith in the Turkish government’s ability to help him rebuild. He said he would stick around just long enough for government inspectors to certify the damage done to his home, in case any rebuilding money ever came along. But he said he doubted that he and his family would ever be coming back.

“My life here is over,” Kandemir said.

Murat Sirmen, the assistant city manager of Izmit, estimated that half the population had left in the past several days.

The exodus stemmed from a variety of factors, Sirmen said. Some people were seeking to escape the nightmare their beloved city had become, a wasteland of cracked buildings and mountains of rubble. Others feared an epidemic, although authorities say that’s unlikely. Still others had lost their jobs when the quake leveled their factories or shops. And there weren’t enough tents for the estimated 150,000 people living in the streets.

“Everyone wants to leave,” Sirmen said.

That’s true even for people whose homes weren’t damaged, he said. Many simply are so traumatized by the quake that they insisted on sleeping outside, even a week later.

The exodus has turned Izmit’s pastel-hued blocks of concrete apartments into abandoned hulks. The government plans to check the buildings to see if they’re safe for families to inhabit. But the inspections are going slowly, and some residents have expressed doubt about recommendations from a government that ignored widespread use of shoddy building materials in the first place.

“How am I supposed to trust them if they say I can stay?” demanded Fatih Yasar, a 25-year-old computer technician who has been living with his family in a makeshift tent, complete with color TV, outside his apartment building.

The factories and military-related businesses in the cities east of Istanbul have drawn migrants from around Turkey for years. The first impulse of many quake victims was to head back to the villages they came from. But others said they would head for another city, where the job prospects were better.

Authorities worried that the downpour that began Monday could drive those people who decided to stay in the area back into delicately tilting homes that could collapse as rain and wind loosened their foundations.

The wet weather is expected to continue for several days.

“We may have some newly entombed people from shifting buildings. We may have more victims,” warned Giovanni Ulloa, a rescue worker with Florida Task Force One from the Miami area.

Authorities also feared that the rain would wash germs from decomposing corpses into the streets. That wasn’t the only health risk. The rain could splatter the cities with toxins released into the sky by a giant blaze touched off by the earthquake at Turkey’s biggest oil refinery, in Izmit. Health Minister Osman Durmus called on people to evacuate the area.

Authorities have not discouraged people in the quake zones from leaving to stay with relatives. Some even see the exodus as a positive factor that will limit the number of people jammed into tent camps.

“The family support network is kicking in,” said a Western diplomat. “People are going home, falling back on it.”

But the scenes at Izmit’s bus terminal Monday were anything but happy.

Yasar Yavuz, a 32-year-old welder, was tenderly feeding hazelnuts to his 4-year-old daughter, Ayse, seated on a duffel bag. They were about to set out on a 16-hour bus trip to the home of Yavuz’s father-in-law. Yavuz’s wife and other four children had made the trip a day earlier, but no ticket was available that day for their smallest daughter.

Yavuz planned to leave the girl in the countryside and return to hunt for a new house and job to replace the ones he’d lost.

“Of course I feel enormous sorrow,” he said, adding he wasn’t sure when he’d see his wife and children again. “But I must come back. I must work and take care of them.”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Many aid agencies are accepting contributions for assistance to victims of the earthquake in Turkey. Please see The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/turkeyaid.

* UNUSED SPECIALISTS: Frustrated Los Angeles urban rescue teams are not on U.S. list to help in Turkey. B1