Death Toll Swells to 362 in Turkey Quake

The death toll from Turkey’s second massive earthquake in three months swelled to 362 late Saturday as rescue teams spent a second frigid night looking for people trapped under scores of flattened apartment blocks.

Turkey’s Health Ministry said that 1,800 people were injured as Friday evening’s magnitude 7.2 temblor wrecked several towns in the country’s northwest. The number of confirmed dead, which tripled during the day, could rise higher, officials said, as search crews with jackhammers strip away the rubble of as many as 300 collapsed buildings.

“The destruction is severe,” said Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

The quake confined its damage mainly to Bolu province but spread shock and dismay across a country that thought it was steadily recovering from the worst of nature’s fury.

Some of the victims had been living in tents after an Aug. 17 quake damaged their apartments but in recent days had taken the risk of moving back home to escape cold autumn rains.

Bolu, a hilly province 100 miles east of Istanbul, is on the eastern edge of a far larger industrial region ravaged by the August temblor, which measured 7.4 and killed more than 17,000 people.

“We thought, ‘Surely nothing can happen again,’ and returned to our apartment,” said Ramazan Celik, a 37-year-old vegetable vendor still shaking from the narrow escape that he, his wife and two children managed as their four-story building crashed around them. “Last night we were taught a lesson for our stupidity.”

Much of Duzce, whose 100,000 people were caught at the epicenter, lay in ruins Saturday. The quake tore through a century-old mosque, leaving only the walls standing. Outside the city’s damaged hospital, evacuated as a safety precaution, surgeons operated on injured victims in the open air.

Electricity was cut to most buildings in the stricken area to reduce the risk of sparks that could ignite leaking gas.

As evening temperatures fell to 37 degrees, survivors wandered the streets, huddled in a park around fires of wood and old tires or simply packed up and hitchhiked out of town.

Dozens of soccer fans crammed into a truck stop cafe, lighted by its own generator, and exploded in cheers Saturday night as Turkey’s national team came from behind to tie Ireland, 1-1, in a televised European championship match from Dublin. But many of the spectators raced for the door when the cafe trembled from one of the aftershocks still rippling across the region.

Meanwhile, smoke from blazes ignited by the temblor hung over Duzce and the settlement of Kaynasli, about 25 miles to the southeast.

Among the dead were dozens of people who were crushed in a single apartment during a Muslim prayer service for a dead relative, passengers on a bus flattened by a falling building, and 20 people engulfed by fire when the quake toppled a stove in a coffeehouse.

One of three lanes on a stretch of the highway between Istanbul and the capital, Ankara, slid off a hillside. Elsewhere on the highway, near Kaynasli, reporters saw five large trucks on their sides. One, carrying emergency medical supplies, was apparently overturned by an aftershock.

Friday’s quake struck at 6:57 p.m., well after dark.

“We were having dinner, and before we knew what was happening, the ceiling fell on us,” Hatice Gusdil said as she lay on a stretcher outside Duzce’s hospital and wept. Her husband, Hakki, and their son, Cumhur, 14, were killed when their single-story house collapsed.

Nazmiye Belkis saved herself by leaping from a second-floor window as her apartment began shaking, but she suffered a broken right leg.

“Look at them,” she said, nodding her head toward 10 bodies covered with white shrouds next to her in the hospital’s garden. “I was lucky.”

The disaster added to a lingering humanitarian emergency in the wider area hit by the August quake.

Tens of thousands of people made homeless then are still living in flimsy, makeshift tents despite repeated government pledges that they would be shifted to winterized shelters before the fall rainy season began. Many lack access to clean running water.

In recent weeks, hundreds of people left jobless by the August quake have demonstrated near the governor’s office to protest their living conditions, only to be dispersed by club-swinging riot police. Hatice Colak and her husband, Ismael, a furniture store owner, got fed up with living in a small tent city behind Duzce’s soccer field and moved back to their slightly damaged second-floor apartment on Bulvar Avenue only days ago.

“Each time it rains, we get soaked,” she said. “It’s so bitterly cold, and we just miss our home so much.”

The couple escaped harm as their five-story building fell Friday, but the quake left them “with only the clothes we are wearing and back in this awful tent again,” Colak said.

“How can we survive in the snow like this?” his wife asked, looking to the winter. She said the couple cannot afford to move away because she recently spent their savings on medical expenses.

Others in Duzce expressed amazement and gratitude that the government, which was bitterly criticized for a slow response to the August quake, reacted so swiftly to this one.

Six army battalions and 50 members of an anti-terrorist police squad joined in the rescue efforts, while three military helicopters ferried badly wounded patients to hospitals in Ankara. Government ambulances stood outside most collapsed buildings, along with backhoes and mobile generators.

President Suleyman Demirel said he had sent a Cabinet minister to each stricken town.

“We cannot complain this time,” Bekir Haci said as he watched scores of soldiers searching the rubble of a coffeehouse for his son and eight other people.

“The government and the army . . . are doing an excellent job,” said Caydun Goktas, a volunteer for Akut, the private Turkish search-and-rescue organization that worked without government help at many collapsed buildings in August.

That quake, he added, “was an education for us all. We’ve come to accept that earthquakes are a part of our daily lives in this country. We’re just dealing with it as best we can.”

As in August, rescue teams rushed here from the United States, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and other countries. Survivors competed for their services, tugging at their bright orange overalls and coaxing them to come to buildings where loved ones were trapped.

Within hours of the quake, Greece said it was sending 40 fire department disaster workers, doctors and quake damage experts on three military transport planes loaded with medical and other emergency supplies.

It was the latest instance of such help by one or the other of the quake-prone neighbors, which have set aside decades of hostility in the face of disaster. At least 143 people died when a 5.9 temblor struck Athens on Sept. 7.

Friday’s temblor rocked buildings in Istanbul, where leaders of 54 countries, including President Clinton, are scheduled to convene Wednesday for a two-day meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Ecevit said the summit would not be canceled. “There was no such request from our guests,” he said.

Clinton was due to arrive in Ankara tonight for a two-day state visit before the Istanbul summit. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and the couple’s daughter, Chelsea, arrived Saturday in the capital, which also felt the shock waves of Friday night’s temblor.

“Our hearts go out to the families of the victims,” Mrs. Clinton said. “As President Clinton has said, America stands ready to help in any way we can.”

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Times staff writer Boudreaux reported from Istanbul and Times special correspondent Zaman reported from Duzce.