The magnitude-7.6 quake destroyed houses in Suzu on the tip of the peninsula and caused fires in the city of Wajima in Ishikawa Prefecture. But the full extent of the damage remains unknown, with rubble and severed roads hampering aid supplies and rescue operations.

Of the 48 victims, 20 were reported in Suzu, 19 in Wajima and 5 in Nanao, according to the prefecture.

“The situation is devastating, as about 90 percent of houses have been completely or nearly completely destroyed,” Suzu Mayor Masuhiro Izumiya said at a prefectural government meeting.

Tsunami warnings covering extensive areas along the Sea of Japan were lifted Tuesday morning after the highest wave of at least 1.2 meters reached Wajima Port on Monday following the 4:10 p.m. quake.

In Wajima, a seven-story building toppled over sideways while a central area known for its morning market was gutted by a large blaze that broke out Monday.

Fires engulfed over 200 structures in the central Wajima area but have been brought under control, Ishikawa prefectural officials said.

The quake has also caused injuries and structural damage in Niigata, Toyama, Fukui and Gifu prefectures.

Photo taken from a Kyodo News plane shows smoke arising from the scene of a fire in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, on Jan. 2, 2024. (Kyodo)

As of before noon Tuesday, the number of evacuees in Ishikawa and Niigata prefectures totaled 57,360, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said.

At a junior high school gymnasium in Wajima where more than 100 evacuees took shelter Monday, many of them ran from the tsunami without warm clothes, with some covering their bodies with sacks in an effort to keep warm.

“It is extremely difficult for vehicles to enter northern areas of the Noto Peninsula,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at a press conference, adding the central government has been coordinating the shipment of relief supplies using ships.

About 1,000 Self-Defense Force personnel are engaged in rescue and relief operations, Kishida said.

According to West Japan Railway Co., some 1,400 shinkansen bullet train passengers were stranded for around 11 hours as the company halted operations for four trains on the Hokuriku line between Toyama and Kanazawa stations to inspect tracks and other facilities following the earthquake. The service resumed late Tuesday afternoon.

The quake was centered around 30 kilometers east-northeast of Wajima with a provisional depth of 16 km, registering a maximum 7 on the country’s seismic intensity scale, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

A level-7 quake is described as making it impossible for people to remain standing. Such a temblor was last recorded in 2018 in Hokkaido, the weather agency said.

The country’s Geospatial Information Authority said it observed that the ground was lifted by up to 4 meters in one spot in Wajima and probably up to about 1 meter in Suzu.

Foreign governments including those of the United States, Canada and Italy offered support.

In Washington, President Joe Biden said in a statement released after the quake that the United States will provide “any necessary assistance for the Japanese people.”

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At 4.17am local time on Monday, the first in a series of earthquakes and aftershocks struck cities in Turkey and Syria, causing widespread devastation and the deaths of thousands.

More than 100 hours later, rescuers continue to work around the clock, hoping to pull more survivors from the debris.

In Kahramanmaras, search and rescue teams are trudging along mountains of debris, as major parts of the city center – including residential buildings, offices, banks and markets – turned into rubble in the aftermath of the magnitude 7.8 and 7.6 earthquakes.

Dozens of local organizations and a steady stream of volunteers are aiding the search, rescue and relief operations. Given the enormity of the task, international teams have arrived to help find survivors.

As the death toll reached more than 21,500 on Friday – amid freezing temperatures and mountains of ruin – hopes of finding many more people alive are dwindling.

Yet, surrounded by destruction, stories of resilience and survival have emerged; of lives miraculously saved even after days trapped beneath the rubble.

Here are the stories of some of those who survived:

110 hours: “Another body has been pulled out from under the rubble and he was alive … 110 hours later,” said Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar, reporting from a rescue site in Kahramanmaras on Friday. “An ambulance now took him to the hospital. And there is another [man] now, they are digging for him.” Our correspondent said rescuers were not yet aware whether the second man was alive, “but the hope here at this moment is very high that a second person – maybe minutes later – could be pulled out from under the rubble, and that he is also alive, 110 hours later”. Just a few hours before, a three-and-a-half-year-old girl was also pulled out of the ruins of the same rescue site alive.

104 hours: Zeynep Kahraman, 40, was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building in the town of Kirikhan on Friday, 104 hours after she was buried alive by the earthquake. German emergency workers lifted her onto a stretcher and into an ambulance. “Now I believe in miracles,” Steven Bayer, the leader of the international search and rescue team said at the site. “You can see the people crying and hugging each other. It’s such a huge relief that this woman under such conditions came out so fit. It’s an absolute miracle.”

In Adiyaman province, southern Turkey, Eyup Ak, 60, was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building on Friday, also 104 hours after being trapped by the quake. Ak was carried on a stretcher to receive medical attention following his rescue.

103 hours: Murat Vural, 66, was rescued in the province of Gaziantep, Islahiye district, 103 hours after the first earthquake had struck. Vural was carried out of the debris after 10 hours of work by members of Turkey’s National Medical Rescue Team (UMKE) and police.

In Kahramanmaras, a 15-year-old Syrian girl was rescued by Azerbaijani teams after 103 hours.

In Hatay, a three-and-a-half-year-old girl was pulled from the rubble, also 103 hours since the initial quake.

102 hours: In the Elbistan district of Kahramanmaras province, UMKE, and police teams saved the life of 33-year-old Mustafa Sahin Sami, 102 hours after the first earthquake. The teams worked for 12 hours to rescue him from the rubble of a seven-story building.

101 hours: Rescue workers in Iskenderun, Turkey said six people were pulled from a collapsed building on Friday morning after spending 101 hours beneath the rubble. The six people, all relatives, survived by huddling together in a small pocket left within the collapsed structure, according to Murat Baygul, a search and rescue worker.

In Hatay province, a miner crew from Zonguldak province saved a mother, Ihlas Ayaz, and her son, 101 hours after the first earthquake struck.

In Kahramanmaras province, two sisters aged 15 and 13 were pulled from the rubble on Friday. The 15-year-old was trapped for 99 hours, and her younger sister for 101 hours; both were given medical attention.

100 hours: Naim Bayasli, 32, was rescued by an Uzbek rescue team from under the rubble of a collapsed building in Hatay province after he was trapped for 100 hours.

96 hours: A family, including a one-and-a-half-year-old girl, was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building on Friday. The family members included the baby’s mother, father, brother and uncle. They were saved in Hatay’s Antakya district after being trapped for 96 hours.

Rescue teams in Kahramanmaras pulled a young Syrian woman, Fatma Karus, 26, alive from the rubble on Friday, 96 hours after the earthquake.

94 hours: Before dawn on Friday, rescuers in Gaziantep pulled a 17-year-old youth from the basement where had been trapped for 94 hours. “Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance. A crowd of friends and relatives chanted his name, clapping and crying tears of joy as he was carried out. The teenager said he had been forced to drink his own urine to slake his thirst.“I was able to survive that way. A rescue worker, identified only as Yasemin, told him: “I have a son just like you … I swear to you, I have not slept for four days. I swear I did not sleep; I was trying to get you out.”

90 hours: A 10-day-old infant was found alive with his mother in Hatay after 90 hours trapped. A five-year-old girl and her father were pulled out of the rubble also at the 90th hour.

89 hours: In Kahramanmaras, a seven-year-old boy and his 32-year-old father Ozan Ramazan Guclu were found alive after 89 hours.

88 hours: In Adıyaman, rescue teams were able to save two siblings aged seven and 14 from the rubble of a six-story building after 88 hours.

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“She is 23, a nurse. She entered the hospital hours after the first earthquake to help evacuate patients. The building collapsed on her when the second earthquake hit. She saved so many, but couldn’t get out herself. We know she was alive for at least 16 hours – she called her husband from under the rubble. But now the rescuers say she is likely gone.”

Thousands of people like Rukiye are believed to still be stuck in the debris of collapsed buildings across Turkey’s southeast following Monday’s devastating earthquakes. According to the government, two major tremors and hundreds of aftershocks destroyed at least 6,444 buildings across 10 provinces, killing more than 12,800 people as of Thursday afternoon.

A tragic combination

As rescuers continue to search through the rubble looking for miracles, the nation is now trying to understand why this natural disaster – for which Turkey was supposedly preparing for more than 20 years – caused so much damage to the country’s infrastructure.

Was it that the two earthquakes – the first at a magnitude of 7.8 and the second at 7.6 – were simply too violent for most buildings to survive? Or that the buildings were not up to modern construction standards?  Was there negligence on the part of the authorities?

People stand by collapsed buildings in Golbasi, Adiyaman, southern Turkey, on February 8, 2023. Thinly stretched rescue teams worked through the night, pulling more bodies from the rubble of thousands of toppled buildings [Emrah Gurel/AP Photo]

According to Professor Okan Tuysuz, a geological engineer from Istanbul Technical University, a tragic combination of all of the above led to Monday’s catastrophe.

“We are dealing with truly massive earthquakes here,” Tuysuz told Al Jazeera. “The first one was roughly equivalent to the energy release from an explosion of about 5 million tonnes of TNT. The second was equivalent to 3.5 million tonnes. Most buildings would struggle to withstand such force.”

Sinan Turkkan, civil engineer and president of Turkey’s Earthquake Retrofit Association, agreed. “Not only were the earthquakes extremely forceful, but they also hit in quick succession,” he explained. “Many buildings only received light to medium damage in the first quake but collapsed after the second one.”

While factoring in that tremors at these magnitudes in quick succession would pose a risk to any building, experts underlined that a tragedy on this scale was not in any way inevitable.

“According to official estimates, 6,000 to 7,000 buildings collapsed on Monday. However strong, no earthquake could have caused this much damage if all buildings were up to standard,” Turkkan said.

On Wednesday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defended his government’s preparations for and response to the earthquakes during a visit to the disaster zone, saying it was “impossible for anyone to prepare for the scale of the disaster”.

He then went on to say that the state will rebuild all collapsed buildings in all 10 provinces affected by the earthquake within a year.

“Just like we did in Malatya, Elazig, Bingol, Van [we will rebuild here]. This is a business we know well. Our government proved its ability [to rebuild] time and time again in the past. We will achieve the same in Hatay, in Maras and also in eight other affected provinces”.

Most of the buildings that collapsed on Monday were constructed before 1999, when a magnitude 7.6 earthquake hit the Western Marmara region, killing 17,500 people. Since then, the government improved the Turkish seismic design code significantly and in 2008, embarked on an ambitious urban transformation project to prepare Turkey for the next big earthquake.

Code enforcement

In November 2022, after a magnitude 6 earthquake damaged more than 2,000 buildings in Duzce, northern Turkey, environment and urbanization minister Murat Kurum underlined that the authorities were working towards making every building in the country “earthquake safe by 2035”.

“We already rebuilt 3.2 million residences,” Kurum said in a social media post. “250,000 residences across 81 provinces and 992 districts are currently being transformed [to meet current regulations]. 6.6 million houses and businesses have been audited. 24 million of our citizens are currently living in earthquake-safe abodes.”

These ambitious efforts, however, were not able to prevent the disaster.

“On paper, Turkey’s seismic design code is up to global standards – it is actually better than most,” Turkkan said. “In practice, however, the situation is very different.”

Rescue teams evacuate a survivor from the rubble of a destroyed building in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, on February 7, 2023 [Khalil Hamra/AP Photo]

The government offered financial incentives but did not make participation in its urban transformation project compulsory. This effectively meant only people who were in a position to make money from rebuilding – people in possession of valuable plots suitable for further development  – agreed to demolish their old properties and rebuild according to the latest code. Many did not want to spend money on rebuilding work or reinforcements that did not seem urgent. This is why, experts say, more than 20 years after the Marmara earthquake, Turkey is full of buildings constructed using sub-par materials and long-discredited construction techniques that immediately crumble when faced with a strong tremor.

“This saddens me deeply as an engineer,” Turkkan said. “If we managed to get everyone on board, we could have either reinforced or rebuilt all defective buildings in the past 20 years. We could have saved at least 5,000 of the buildings that we lost on Monday from complete destruction. We could have saved many, many lives.”

Experts believe the government and local authorities could have taken further precautions to ensure all buildings were safe and earthquake design regulations are being implemented in all contexts.

“For years we held conferences, wrote reports and sent them to local authorities. We told them big earthquakes will inevitably hit cities like Hatay and Gaziantep again,” Tuysuz said. “We explained to them however strong, no building built directly on a fault line can survive an earthquake – it would be torn apart. We said we should create accurate fault-line maps for the entire country and transform areas directly on active fault lines into green zones with construction bans. No one listened.”

Even new buildings were lacking

There were also shortcomings in ensuring regulations were being followed in new construction.

“Some relatively new buildings also collapsed in this earthquake, which likely means contractors took shortcuts, tried to economize using sub-par materials and authorities failed to do their due diligence before approving construction projects,” Tuysuz said.

Several schools, administrative buildings, hospitals and even the headquarters of Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) in Hatay also collapsed on Monday.

“According to the state’s own regulations, public buildings are supposed to be much stronger than private ones,” Turkkan explained. “When you are building a hospital, a post office or any other public building, you are instructed to use more concrete, more iron, get more detailed ground studies. This is to ensure those buildings survive any earthquake or other natural disaster and so that they can continue serving people at a time of crisis”.

Tuysuz agreed. “It is completely unacceptable for a public building, a power plant or an airport to collapse in an earthquake,” he said. “There are very strict regulations in place to prevent this. The scenes we are witnessing today in the southeast are proof of the state’s shortcomings in implementing its own rules even in constructions over which it has complete control.”

So what needs to be done?

There are some 20 million buildings in Turkey. In Istanbul, where experts believe a major earthquake will hit sooner or later, there are 1.2 million, according to the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute at Bogazici University. Their experts believe a significant percentage of these buildings are not in a condition to withstand tremors at high magnitudes.

Reinforcing or rebuilding all at-risk buildings in all earthquake-prone areas would be technically and logistically difficult and costly. Yet it is a task that cannot be avoided or delayed.

“The government needs to be more forceful in making people get their buildings audited, reinforced and if necessary rebuilt,” Turkkan said. “People are understandably not volunteering to pay up, but this is a matter of life and death, and it should be treated as such.

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The quake killed at least 641 people across both countries, toppling buildings and sending rescuers scrambling through the rubble to find survivors.

The death toll was expected to rise, with experts warning that aftershocks could continue for days or weeks. Tremors were also felt in Cyprus, Egypt, and Lebanon.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Twitter that “search and rescue teams were immediately dispatched” to the areas hit by the quake.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil Defence, which operates in the opposition-held portions of northern Syria, declared a state of emergency and appealed for “the international community to support the rescue of civilians in Syria”.

Where did the earthquake hit?

The earthquake occurred at 4:17am (01:17 GMT), with its epicentre in Kahramanmaras in Gaziantep province, about 33km (20 miles) from the capital city of Gaziantep, which is home to more than two million people, including hundreds of thousands of Syrians who fled during the country’s war, which began in 2011.

The US Geological Survey agency noted that the area contains many buildings constructed of brick masonry or brittle concrete, making them “extremely vulnerable to earthquake shaking”.

A person is rescued from the wreckage of a building in Adana, Turkey [Eren Bozkurt/Anadolu Agency]

The quake was about 50km (31 miles) from the border of northwest Syria, where about 1.7 million internally displaced Syrians live in a cluster of camps in areas controlled by opposition groups still fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Several large government-controlled cities, including Aleppo, with a dense population of nearly 2 million, are located in the area.

More than 40 aftershocks were felt in the wake of the initial quake, including one with a magnitude of 6.7.

Those aftershocks stretched “a distance of about 100km to 200km (62 to 124 miles) all along a big fault line,” Chris Elders, professor at the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, told Al Jazeera, referring to the East Anatolian Fault, which stretches across the southeastern portion of Turkey.

What do we know about the casualties?

The death toll was rising rapidly on Monday, with Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management agency saying at least 284 people were killed in seven Turkish provinces by 10:35am (07:35 GMT).

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said 2,023 people were wounded and 1,718 buildings had collapsed in the country.

Rescuers were digging through the rubble of leveled buildings in the city of Kahramanmaras and neighboring Gaziantep. Crumbled buildings were also reported in Adiyaman, Malatya and Diyarbakir.

The death toll in government-held areas of Syria climbed to 237 with more than 630 injured, according to Syrian state media, with deaths reported in the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Tartous.

At least 120 people were killed and more than 230 injured in rebel-held parts of northwestern Syria on Monday, rescue workers said.

(Al Jazeera)

“Large damage and local devastation has to be expected. Rescue forces are in the area right now and we will see the number rising over the next days,” Martin Mai, a professor of geophysics at King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, told Al Jazeera.

“In the past, these earthquakes in Turkey have led to about 10,000 to 13,000 fatalities owing to building style construction and the sheer size of this event will have profound economic impact as well.”

The famous Yeni Mosque, which dates back to the 13th century, partially collapsed in the province of Maltaya, where a 14-story building with 28 apartments also collapsed.

Is the rescue effort going to work?

Rescue efforts are being hampered by a winter blizzard that covered major roads in ice and snow.

Aid workers warned of a particularly dire situation in northwest Syria.

“Right now we have a crisis, in addition to very bad weather conditions and collapsed buildings, and unfortunately, damaged hospitals,” Mazen Kiwara, the Middle East Regional Director for the Syrian American Medical Society, told Al Jazeera.

Rescue workers are seen in Afrin, Syria [Ugur Yildirim/Getty Images]

“We got initial information from our hospitals … The hospitals are overwhelmed by the number of casualties,” he said, adding that several hospitals had to be evacuated.

There were “five to seven deaths in a fetal hospital in Afrin,” Kiwara added, “including one pregnant mother who passed away but our colleagues succeeded to get out her baby alive. And he’s in a good condition right now.”

Why was the earthquake so deadly?

Curtin University’s Elders said the depth of the earthquake, at about 18km (11 miles) deep, made the incident particularly devastating.

While that “sounds quite deep”, he said, however, “the energy that’s released by the earthquake will be felt quite close to the surface with much greater intensity than if it was deeper in the crust”.

Naci Gorur, an earthquake expert with Turkey’s Academy of Sciences, urged local officials to immediately check the region’s dams for cracks to avert potentially catastrophic flooding.

Turkey predominantly sits on the Anatolian Plate, with two major faults, the North Anatolian Fault, which runs between the Anatolian Plate and the Eurasian Plate to the north of Turkey’s land mass, and the East Anatolian Fault, which runs along the Arabian Plate to the southeast of Turkey’s territory.

The geological location makes Turkey one of the world’s most active earthquake zones.

In 1999, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit the Duzce region in northeastern Turkey, killing more than 17,000 people, including more than 1,000 in Istanbul, the country’s largest city.

Monday’s quake was the highest magnitude since another magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Erzincan province in 1939, killing over 30,000.

The post What is happening in Turkey, Syria? Key quake questions answered appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

No deaths were attributed to the temblor that struck at 11:07 p.m. Saturday, registering upper 6 on Japan’s seismic intensity scale of 7 in parts of Fukushima and Miyagi, the prefectures devastated by a magnitude-9.0 quake and tsunami in March 2011 that left more than 15,000 people dead and triggered a nuclear crisis.

While a tsunami did not occur, Saturday’s quake provided a chilling reminder of that disaster, just weeks before its 10th anniversary.

In Koriyama in Fukushima, Yosuke Mashiko, 37, was cleaning up smashed bottles and glasses in the “izakaya” Japanese-style pub that he runs.

With his business already hurt by the spread of the novel coronavirus, Mashiko said, “I’m at a loss, although I can’t blame anybody (for the pandemic and quake).”

Jonathan Stimmer, a 34-year-old doctoral student at Tohoku University in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi, said, “I was relieved to know we were not expecting any tsunami.” He was at home when the latest quake happened.

Stimmer said his microwave and a few plates fell to the floor, adding the temblor was a “reminder to stay safe and alert over the next few days.”

Injuries were reported in the two prefectures and seven others, including Chiba, Kanagawa, and Saitama that neighbor Tokyo, a Kyodo News tally showed. The quake was also felt in the Japanese capital and several other areas.

Water in a spent nuclear fuel pool spilled over at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which suffered meltdowns after the March 11, 2011, disaster, but there was no leak, according to operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.

Other nuclear utilities reported there were no irregularities.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said at a meeting of Cabinet members in the morning that the government had received reports of many injuries but no deaths and urged people to stay alert.

“We want people to act quickly by not letting their guard down and paying close attention to the information provided by local authorities,” Suga said, noting there could be quakes with an intensity of upper 6 over the next seven days or so.

Since late Saturday, a series of aftershocks registering up to 4 on the intensity scale have been occurring.

Around 950,000 households were left without electricity at one point, but power had been restored by Sunday afternoon.

The areas hit by the quake as well as the 2011 disaster contain Tokyo Olympic venues, including Azuma Stadium in the city of Fukushima, which will host baseball and softball games. The organizing committee of the games, due to begin in July, said all facilities were reported as undamaged.

Fallen rocks are seen on a road in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, on Feb. 14, 2021, 
after an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3 struck northeastern Japan late on 
Feb. 13. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said he had been assured that ultracold storage of Pfizer Inc.’s novel coronavirus vaccine, the first doses of which arrived in Japan on Friday, was unaffected by the blackouts.

As at least 240 people had sought shelter in evacuation centers in Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures, Kato stressed that measures to prevent the spread of the virus had been implemented.

In Soma in Fukushima Prefecture, the city government set up tents for individual families in a gymnasium, with up to 92 residents staying there after having their hands disinfected and their temperatures were taken at the entrance.

Some parts of the two prefectures had experienced disruptions to a water supply that affected medical institutions.

At the request of the Fukushima prefectural government, the Ground Self-Defense Force began supplying water to residents.

A landslide occurred along the Joban Expressway in Soma, prompting East Nippon Expressway Co. to close the section between Iwakichuo in the prefecture and Watari in Miyagi Prefecture.

Heavy equipment had been dispatched to remove large boulders and soil blocking all lanes.

East Japan Railway Co. said it is expected to take about 10 days before Tohoku shinkansen bullet train services return to full operation as facilities between Shinshirakawa Station in Fukushima and Furukawa in Miyagi were heavily damaged.

The Akita shinkansen service between Tokyo and Akita, also in Japan’s northeast, will be halted through Monday.

The partial suspension of bullet train services prompted airlines to operate special flights connecting cities in the Tohoku region and Tokyo as well as other major cities.

Photo taken on Feb. 14, 2021, shows an electronic sign board at JR Sendai Station 
in Miyagi Prefecture notifying passengers of the suspension of shinkansen bullet 
train services following the previous day's magnitude 7.3 earthquake off 
Japan's northeastern coast. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo

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