BINGOL, Turkey, 2 May 2003 — A powerful earthquake killed up to 150 people in a mountainous region of southeastern Turkey early yesterday. The dead included 25 children crushed when a boarding school collapsed on dozens of sleeping students.
Anatolia news agency said about 70 children had been rescued alive and taken to a nearby hospital tent for treatment. Twenty-five bodies were found and 112 were believed to be trapped under the tangled mass of masonry and metal.
Rescuers clambering over the demolished building said they could hear cries from below the rubble.
“Intense rescue efforts are continuing. Our government is totally determined to deal swiftly with this disaster,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in a televised address after flying from Ankara to Bingol.
The quake rocked the region at 3:27 a.m. and flattened more than a dozen buildings in Bingol city. Others in the city and outlying countryside were badly damaged.
Housing Minister Zeki Ergezen, speaking in Ankara, said unconfirmed reports put the estimated death toll as high as 150. “The picture is getting increasingly serious,” he said.
Transport Minister Ali Coskun said 84 people were confirmed dead and 390 injured.
The four-story dormitory, finished in 1998, was home to 198 young children when the quake struck. The school housed children up to the age of around 14 from villages in the surrounding countryside too small to have their own school.
Bystanders cheered as rescue workers pulled one dazed boy from the collapsed building and carried him to an ambulance.
“Who knocked the building down?” Veysel Dagdelen, aged 12, asked after being rescued from the ruins of the school. “When they were pulling me out my friends were asking help from me. They’re still inside. Help them,” he told Anatolia.
“The stable I built didn’t collapse, but the school did,” Anatolia quoted the parent of a rescued boy as saying.
Women wailed and cried as local soldiers and civilians pounded with pickaxes and mechanized diggers at the rubble of apartment blocks in and around Bingol’s city center. Aftershocks continued to ripple underfoot. Army vehicles patrolled, warning people not to approach damaged buildings.
Attention immediately focused on accusations that shoddy standards were responsible for buildings too flimsy to ride out the tremor. Erdogan promised to investigate whether there was corruption involved in state building contracts.
“We might suspect that there was stealing from the materials. Unfortunately that kind of mistake can happen...We have seen similar things in other earthquakes. We must learn the lesson as a society and those guilty of this must face justice,” Erdogan said.
Neighboring Greece — which suffered devastating quakes alongside Turkey in 1999 — offered $335,500 in aid and said it had a transport plane ready to fly in rescue workers and equipment.
