SUNDAY REPORT : 45 Seconds of Fury, Four Families Forever Changed : Quake Survivors’ Lives in Ruins : Disaster shatters Turkey’s aspiring middle class. ‘Everything was destroyed,’ man laments.

Ibrahim Bogan lay in the dark and took stock.

His body throbbed under an enormous weight on the side of his head and left leg. He choked on the dusty air.

“Ibrahim! Ibrahim!”

It was Sehnaz, his wife. She lay a few feet away, unable to get up. They could not see each other.

“I can’t breathe,” he told her.

Groping with her one free hand, she found a piece of cardboard. She waved it furiously, and the air stirred. Ibrahim breathed easier. They clasped hands and waited.

It was 3:03 a.m., Aug. 17.

At midnight the couple, rural migrants to this industrial city, had been at the kitchen table talking. About his day. About the money clients owed him for painting their houses. About their sons, both asleep. About the long, uphill road their family had traveled--a road that was soon to take a violent turn.

They hadn’t been sleeping long, he recalls, when “this loud noise, this shaking and thunderous noise” hurled them from the bed and brought down their apartment--and tens of thousands like it in a sprawl of seaside factory towns.

One of Turkey’s deadliest recorded earthquakes lasted 45 seconds but irrevocably altered the lives of hundreds of thousands in ways that few Westerners, even Californians who are used to destructive earthquakes, can imagine.

The 7.4-magnitude upheaval did more than topple buildings and kill as many as 40,000 people. The quake tore into the country’s aspiring middle class, striking hardest at people who had flocked to the dynamic, fast-growing northwest to seek betterment.

Senem Korkmaz, a saleswoman at Izmit’s Benetton clothing shop, was engaged to marry Fatih Yasar, a computer specialist.

Necati Kus, 51, had moved his family to the city of Golcuk from a poorer region and opened a fruit and vegetable market.

Pinar Atas, 9, had come to Istanbul with her parents at age 1; her father worked as a restaurant cashier. Like the Bogan couple, they were Kurds who had migrated from a world away, in rural southeast Turkey.

They lived in tall apartment buildings--fatally flawed symbols of upward mobility for the arrivals from Turkey’s rural villages and urban shantytowns. Like their economically vibrant country, struggling to shed its Third World poverty, they had achieved relative comfort and security after a generation of hard work.

In 45 seconds, it all vanished in a social cataclysm that has threatened the country’s economic health and undermined public confidence in its leaders.

One Part Happy, One Part Hurt

Fatih Yasar had been dreaming of the wedding for ages. During all his school years, as he wooed his girlfriend. During all the nights he had patrolled mountain towns as a military conscript, prickly with fear of a rebel attack.

Finally, Fatih’s military service was nearing an end. He was bursting with plans to get a job and marry Senem Korkmaz next year.

The quake shattered his dreams. In a thunderous crash, his fiancee’s five-story building collapsed. An armoire tipped over her bed, holding back the ceiling, and Senem scrambled to safety. But her parents, two brothers, sister-in-law and 8-year-old nephew were killed.

Fatih has now moved up the wedding, a quick ceremony that will take place just after the 40-day period of Muslim mourning. “She has nobody to take care of her,” he explains.

Senem is no longer a beaming bride-to-be. She spends her days at her older sister’s home in Istanbul, trying to recover from a bruised chest and the flashbacks that overwhelm her. Following Muslim mourning traditions, she doesn’t listen to music or watch TV.

The couple are torn between sorrow and their relief at having each other when so many have died.

“Everyone loves a wedding, and we wanted to be happy,” says Fatih, a tall 25-year-old with a crew cut and big, gentle eyes. “But we have had a tragedy. One part of our hearts is very hurt. One part is still happy.”

Fatih was performing his military service in Agri, in eastern Turkey, when the quake struck. He rushed home to Izmit.

“I was born here. I went into the city, and I almost cried. Everything was destroyed,” he says.

‘All My Friends . . . Are Dead’

His own family was lucky. Their building stood; his parents and younger brother survived. But they are so traumatized they now live in a tent pitched outside. Their snug, tidy apartment, with its baskets of plastic roses and lace tablecloths, is a place they visit to get out of the rain or cook a meal.

Senem has been the center of Fatih’s life for 10 years, since he spotted the girl with the round, gentle face and shiny brown hair at a bus stop. “It was love,” he says simply.

He pursued her for two months before she finally agreed to go out with him. It was the start of a long relationship, not just with her but with her family, who lived nearby. Before leaving for his military service, Fatih would eat lunch with the Korkmaz family nearly every day. He even drank raki, the potent Turkish liquor, with Senem’s father--a sign Fatih was regarded as a son.

The couple had a bright future. Senem, 25, enjoyed her job at Benetton. Fatih had contacts and good job prospects in some of the factories around Izmit after he left the army.

When he returned to Izmit last week, Fatih initially vowed to stay, despite the scarred landscape of rubble and silent apartment buildings. But then he began looking for his friends. He came to a horrifying conclusion: They had died or fled.

By Tuesday, Fatih had decided the pain was too great. After marrying, he wants to seek work in the United States or Canada.

“All my friends, and my girlfriend’s friends and relatives, are dead. I’ve been crying for a week. I have no more ties with this city and country,” he said.

The quake spared the Kuses’ lives but broke their shaky grip on prosperity. Now it threatens to tear the family apart.

In 1984, Necati Kus brought his wife and children to Golcuk with hope of opening a shop and owning a home.

“Everyone was coming to Golcuk then,” said Necati, who left behind the city of Trabazon in northeast Turkey. “There was nothing in our city, and we heard that this was a place where a man could find work.”

In Golcuk, he was able to cobble together many of the accouterments of a comfortable life: He bought a television set and a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator.

With an old truck to ferry the produce, Necati started a fruit and vegetable market. It wasn’t much, just a little stand on Main Street, but it paid the bills and kept the family’s dreams alive. Little by little, the Kuses stashed away bits of money, which they converted into German marks as a hedge against inflation.

“All we wanted was our own little house,” said Fakriye, Necati’s wife.

After 15 years of saving, the Kuses last year put a down payment on a $20,000 apartment in the city’s New Quarter. The year also brought bad news. Doctors discovered a tumor in Necati’s side, and the subsequent surgery left him too weak to work. He passed the business on to his 25-year-old son, Murat.

The night of the quake, the Kuses slept on their sixth-floor balcony--as they often did during the summer. As the earth shook, the building next to theirs imploded, and the Kuses’ building fell, like a toy, onto its side and broke into pieces.

“I was standing on the balcony trying to determine what was happening, and then I awoke on the ground trapped beneath the rubble,” Necati said.

Necati’s grandson, 10-year-old Surat, lay trapped for 45 minutes but survived with cuts and bruises. The rest of the family came out OK; Murat managed to rescue a neighbor who had been caught beneath a fallen arch.

Little else was the same: The apartment was obliterated, a pile of twisted metal, blocks of cement and shards of glass. The washing machine lay on its side, crushed and bent. There was a frame without a picture. The refrigerator, somehow, stood upright. In the confusion, Necati carried away only one thing from the house, a can of propane gas.

“I thought we could use it to cook,” he said.

Twelve people in the apartment building were dead. When the Kuses returned to the rubble the next day, looters had already struck. Their savings of 500 German marks, about $270, was gone.

“We are grateful to have survived,” Necati said.

Six days after the earthquake, the Kuses were living beneath a canvas tent a mile from their crumpled home. As the rain came down, they shared slices of cheese and watermelon donated by the Turkish government.

Now the family must split up. Necati and his wife will return to Trabazon to live with her sister. Strangers in the camp donated the money for the bus tickets. With the family business destroyed, Murat will stay behind and look for a job in one of the city’s factories.

With his illness, Necati realizes he probably can’t return to work and start again. But he doesn’t want to divide the family. Sitting under the soggy tent, he searched for a way to tell himself that one day he and Fakriye might be able to return.

“Perhaps the government will build us a new house,” he said.

A Child Survives Alone

Pinar Atas does not sleep much. When she speaks, it is in a whisper, in few words that barely make sentences. She stares off into space a lot, focusing her large, dark eyes on a distant object that no one else sees.

The quake made Pinar an orphan. Her family--her mother, father, two brothers, pregnant sister and brother-in-law--was killed when their five-story apartment building in the Istanbul suburb of Avcilar came crashing to the ground. Pinar awoke to the noise and darkness.

“I saw everything falling down,” said the 9-year-old, who found protection from a toppled wardrobe. She watched her mother die.

Uncounted thousands of children lost parents in the Turkish disaster. Turkish custom dictates that an orphaned child be taken in by other relatives, and relief workers say many children are thus parceled out. In some cases, though, so many members of a single family have been wiped out that there may be no one left to care for a surviving child.

Pinar’s closest relatives are distant cousins living far away, in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. They have not spoken up to claim the small girl with long dark hair.

And so Yucel Alioglu, a neighbor from an unscathed building half a block away, stepped in. He and his wife, Sevin, took Pinar in and plan to make her part of their family. She is sharing a small bedroom with the Alioglus’ 15-year-old daughter, Mehtap. It has curtains and a frilly pink bedspread.

The Alioglus knew the Atases only casually. Their legal claim to Pinar is tenuous. But Yucel Alioglu was especially touched by the girl’s predicament. He grew up an orphan himself, reared by brothers after his parents died a few years apart.

“My daughter will be a sister to her,” Alioglu said as he sipped strong coffee in his living room. “She will stay with us and we will send her to school, and one day she will marry and leave us. . . . I will do all I can to give her a future.”

The Alioglus are Turks. The Atases were Kurds--an ethnic minority that has sought autonomy and battled the Turkish army on and off for generations. Pinar has grown up speaking Kurdish at home, and now will be reared by Turks. Yucel Alioglu insisted that the differences don’t matter.

“They were Kurds, but they were good Muslims,” he said. “They knew how to pray. If they had been terrorists I would not have accepted Pinar.”

Although Alioglu said he will not demand that Pinar give up her culture, it seems clear that that part of her life died with her parents and siblings.

“My new family does not know how to speak Kurdish,” she said quietly.

Pinar, who escaped physical injury except for a small scratch on the bridge of her nose, has always wanted to be a doctor. Now she is not so sure of anything. She is bewildered and scared. When she walks past the site of her old building--it is now nothing more than a razed pit--she hardly glances at it.

Asked if she will be happy living with the Alioglus, she looked down at her hands.

“I have nobody,” she said, shrugging.

Returning to the Land

Lying in the rubble that night, Ibrahim Bogan prayed. “Allah, spare my family,” he whispered. “Forgive me my sins.”

He relived his life and waited to die.

He had brought his wife to Istanbul in 1984 right after the birth of their first son, Okan. Their decision was not just economic; it meant leaving their Kurdish homeland, where one-fourth of Turkey’s ethnic Kurds remain, and swapping their distinct culture for the Turkish mainstream.

One dream, more than any other, reflected the couple’s drive to be fully accepted as Turkish citizens--to enroll Okan in Istanbul’s Kuleli military academy, the first step in an armed forces career.

A wiry man with thick black hair and a bottlebrush mustache, Ibrahim, 39, drove a cab for six years in Istanbul, then moved to Izmit and started a house-painting business with his next-door neighbor. His rural-bred Muslim piety gave way to drinking and gambling, but he managed to save some money toward a home.

Then a recession hit Turkey last year. The painter’s clients stopped paying, and his savings dwindled. Two months ago the landlord abruptly kicked the Bogans out, wanting their apartment for himself.

Without much time to look, they settled for a flat in a building that shook when trucks drove past. It was a fateful choice, Gahin Bogan, the painter’s brother, said later. “The steel support rods in that building were so thin, just like needles.”

The solar eclipse that occurred over Turkey on Aug. 11 disturbed Ibrahim. “The world is about to end,” he recalls thinking.

Six nights later, part of his world did.

From under the rubble, he called to his sons.

“I’m OK,” replied one voice. It was Gurkan, 9, trapped in the ruins of the brothers’ bedroom.

“How is Okan?”

“He’s asleep,” Gurkan answered.

“At that moment, I knew he was dead,” the father says now, with tears in his eyes.

Ibrahim lies on a bloodstained pillow in Istanbul’s Kartal State Hospital with an antibiotic drip in his swollen left foot and bandages around his left arm. His left shoulder is dislocated, and several bones are broken. He undergoes daily dialysis to purge his kidneys of toxic fluid released in his body when it was crushed by a collapsing wall.

Nineteen people were buried by the five-story building. Neighbors noticed Ibrahim’s left hand sticking out of the wreckage and summoned his wife’s brother, who rounded up a backhoe. The digging took 36 hours. Only Ibrahim, his wife and younger son survived.

The painter has sworn off drinking and gambling and vowed to pray five times a day. But the quake has reversed the family odyssey. They are moving back where they came from.

“I have nothing left--no money in the bank,” Ibrahim said. “The people who owed me, well, I can’t ask them for it. They’ve probably died or lost loved ones. Anyway, the houses I painted probably collapsed. Right now I’m disabled. Where would I work? At least in the southeast I have some land to till.”

This article was reported by Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux, Dexter Filkins, Mary Beth Sheridan and Tracy Wilkinson.