[튀르키예·시리아 대지진]
Estimated over 80,768 injured
Some “Up to 200,000 Trapped in Wreckage”
As of 4:00 p.m. local time (10:00 p.m. Korean time) on the 10th, 22,375 people died in the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria. It far exceeded the number of deaths (19,846) in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Foreign media including the Washington Post (WP) tallied the cumulative number of deaths as of today, the fifth day after the earthquake, as 18,991 in Turkiye and 3,384 in Syria. It is estimated that more than 80,768 people were injured in the two countries.
The New York Times (NYT) and others reported that in major affected areas, terrible scenes continued, such as outdoor parking lots and gyms being turned into huge morgues. Hundreds of corpse storage bags (body bags) were lined up in the outdoor parking lot of a hospital in Hatay Province, Turkey. In a cemetery in Kahramanmaras, wooden pieces with names written in pens are lined up without proper tombstones. According to the New York Times, many people are burying their bodies in haste after wiping them with sand and soil according to Islamic funeral procedures in times of disaster or water shortage.
There are concerns that the death toll will continue to rise significantly for the time being. “Up to 200,000 people are trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, but there is little chance of them surviving,” said Öbguin Ahmet Erzan, an earthquake expert and professor at Istanbul Technical University, on his Twitter account.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that there was a 24% chance that the death toll would exceed 100,000. In the first report immediately after the earthquake, it was 0%, and on the 8th it was 14%, but it increased by 10 percentage points in two days. The only earthquakes in this century that have killed more than 100,000 people are the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (about 230,000 people) and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (about 220,000 people).
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.