World

Turkey's Landscape Of Death

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 28, 1999 / 3:40 PM EDT / CBS

I arrived in Istanbul Friday morning, three days after the earthquake. My initial first-person account came from my taxi driver, Ali Filizfidan, who lives in Istanbul with his parents and his wife.

"I was in the bathroom when I felt the room shake for about eight seconds," he recalled. He ran out to awaken his family, just as the main quake began. "I was scared, I thought we were going to die."

Hard News Update

Turkey: Fresh Joly Brings Panic
Survivors are fleeing northwestern Turkey in the wake of another deadly tremor.
September 1, 1999

CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston

Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, sustained some damage, but escaped the massive destruction experienced in Izmit, Golcuk, Yalova and other locations.

Istanbul's ancient Roman aqueduct, for example, weathered this catastrophe as it has so many others since it was built in the 4th Century.

Izmit
Three men stood atop of what had been a four-story apartment building. They watched a neighbor pound a hole in the roof of the building, looking for a photo album with pictures of three children killed in the quake. "Memories," one man said, "the father is looking for memories."

Istanbul's Aqueduct

Throughout western Turkey, one factor blamed for the extensive death toll is shoddy construction. Ironically, one building was built by the father and grandfather of children killed in the quake. The father said he put more steel in the concrete than was required. But, if he could do it over, he would build it twice as strong.

A grateful resident of Izmit extended his hand to a member of the Fairfax County Virginia Search and Rescue squad, formlly known as Task Force One. By Friday, the squad had pulled four survivors from beneath tons of concrete and steel.

The Virginia team, along with the Miami-Dade County group, is under contract to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for deployment throughout the U.S. and abroad. Other rescue teams operating immediately after the earthquake included Japan, Austria, and the United Kingdom.

One week later, with little hope of finding more survivors, most teams had left.

Adapazari

Ali Filizfidan felt the earthquake tremors.

Adapazari was one of the most heavily damaged cites in western Turkey. Seventy thousand of its 360,000 buildings were destroyed by the quake. As heavy equipment continually clears away rubble, the air is filled with a film of dust. The soot, as well as the occasional smell of rotting corpses, forces most people to wear face masks.

Warnings to stay out of collapsed buildings were mostly ignored, as survivors tried to salvage furnishings and keepsakes. People crawled under concrete slabs to gain access to the remains of their homes. One man climbed under the rubble and emerged with a chandelier.

Despite widespread belief that shoddy construction contributed to the devastation, Musaffer Pala insists that it was the power of the earthquake, not the building methods, that destroyed most structures. A civil engineer with an Istanbul consulting firm, Pala came to Adapazari to assess construction-related causes.


	.	Tragedy In Turkey Photo Essay: The Aftermath