The quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 triggered waves of around 1 meter along parts of the west coast with a larger wave expected, public broadcaster NHK reported.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has issued tsunami warnings for the coastal prefectures of Ishikawa, Niigata and Toyama, marking the first major warnings since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan.

A major tsunami warning means there is a possibility of waves more than 3 meters tall.

Russia also issued tsunami warnings in its Far Eastern cities of Vladivostok and Nakhodka.

Some houses have been destroyed and army units have been dispatched to help with rescue operations, top government spokesperson Hayashi Yoshimasa told reporters, adding that authorities were still assessing the extent of the damage.

More strong quakes in the area, where seismic activity has been simmering for more than three years, could occur over coming days, JMA official Toshihiro Shimoyama said.

In comments to the press shortly after the quake struck, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also warned residents to prepare for more disasters.

“Residents need to stay on alert for further possible quakes and I urge people in areas where tsunamis are expected to evacuate as soon as possible,” Kishida said.

“Run!” a bright yellow warning flashed across television screens advising residents in specific areas of the coast to immediately evacuate their homes.

Images carried by local media showed a building collapsing in a plume of dust in the coastal city of Suzu and a huge crack in a road in Wajima where panicked-looking parents clutched their children. The quake also jolted buildings in the capital Tokyo, some 500 km from Wajima on the opposite coast.

More than 36,000 households had lost power in Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures, utilities provider Hokuriku Electric Power said.

High-speed rail services to Ishikawa have been suspended while telecom operators Softbank and KDDI reported phone and internet service disruptions in Ishikawa and Niigata, according to their websites.

Japanese airline ANA turned back planes headed to airports in Toyama and Ishikawa, while Japan Airlines canceled most of its services to Niigata and Ishikawa regions and authorities said one of Ishikawa’s airports was closed.

Nuclear plants

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority said no irregularities have been confirmed at nuclear power plants along the West Coast, including five active reactors at Kansai Electric Power’s Ohi and Takahama plants in Fukui Prefecture.

Hokuriku’s Shika plant in Ishikawa, the closest nuclear power station to the quake’s epicenter, had already halted its two reactors before the quake for regular inspections and saw no impact from the quake, the agency said.

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and devastated towns and nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima.

Another quake, known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake, hit western Japan in 1995, killing more than 6,000 people, mainly in the city of Kobe.

Monday’s quake struck during the Jan. 1 public holiday when millions of Japanese traditionally visit temples to mark the new year.

In Kanazawa, a popular tourist destination in Ishikawa, images showed the remnants of a collapsed torii gate strewn at the entrance of a shrine as anxious worshippers looked on.

Kanazawa resident Ayako Daikai said she had evacuated to a nearby elementary school with her husband and two children soon after the earthquake hit. Classrooms, stairwells, hallways and the gymnasium were all packed with evacuees, she said.

“I also experienced the Great Hanshin Earthquake, so I thought it would be safest to evacuate,” she told Reuters when contacted by telephone. (Reuters)

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The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami advisory for the island chain after the quake was detected at around 11:00 a.m., predicting 1-meter waves would reach the area. Tsunami waves as high as 30 centimeters were measured at Hachijo Island at 12:17 p.m.

The agency lifted the advisory at 1:15 p.m.

The quake struck off Torishima, an uninhabited island around 580 kilometers south of Tokyo, at a depth of 17 km.

The agency revised the initially reported magnitude of 6.6 and depth of 10 km.

The temblor did not register 1 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7, according to the agency.

The agency warned that the region could be hit by further quakes as seismic activity has continued since earlier this week.

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The tremor’s epicenter was Badakhshan, 16km west of Ishqashim of Tajikistan, felt around 7:19 am local time on April 7.

Badakhshan is one of the provinces in the country primarily prone to natural disasters, including earthquakes, landslides, flooding, and avalanches.

This fifth quake jolted the province within ten days, increasing worry among the experts and local people.

Meanwhile, the province was hit with a powerful tremor last month, with the epicenter of the Jurm district of the province killing dozens and injuring more than a hundred people across the country.

Meanwhile, in the last two weeks, more than 30 provinces witnessed heavy rains and flash flooding, killing 21 people and injuring more than a hundred others.

Natural disasters leave massive damage in the country due to poor infrastructure and management systems.

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On Ataturk Avenue in Antakya, a lone mountaineering tent is perched next to a mangled heap of iron rebars and concrete. Men in bright orange and yellow luminescent jackets can be seen rushing up and down the debris.

Nearby, excavators are digging into the rubble of multiple buildings that collapsed into each other on the fateful night of February 6, when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck southern and southeastern Türkiye, killing more than 40,000 people.

The tent was erected by Mustafa Kazazz, a 25-year-old man with broad shoulders and trimmed hair. For the past two fortnights, he has barely strayed away from his tent — his dirt-stained pants and worn-out boots poked with holes bear testament to his determination.

“We have found someone’s limb. We’ll keep you posted with more updates,” was the latest update Kazazz received from two men from AFAD, Türkiye’s disaster management agency, on the morning of February 21.

Mustafa Kazazz refuses to budge from the site of a collapsed building – he’ll leave only with the bodies of his family members. (Saad Hasan / TRTWorld)

Antakya, the largest district in  Hatay, was one of the province’s worst hit. And Kazazz lost his entire family — his father, mother, two sisters and brother.

Even with all the heavy-duty machines and modern devices, locating and extracting bodies is a long, arduous process. AFAD teams have first to remove debris piece by piece, ensuring heavy concrete slabs remain intact. One wrong step can destabilise the concrete wreckage and crush the bodies stuck underneath.

The earthquakes of magnitudes 7.7 and 7.6 have left in their wake stories of pain, grief and longing.

Tens of thousands of survivors are living in tents. Many have moved to other cities. Authorities have dug out thousands of bodies and buried hundreds of unidentified ones. The search for missing people — all presumed dead by now — continues.

Across the district, government and relief organizations have set up temporary tent cities with hundreds of kitchens and mobile toilets. Lentils and beans are made in large pots, and tea is distributed from kiosks run by different municipalities.

While bodies are being pulled out in the absence of their next of kin, Kazazz refuses to leave his family members behind in the mountain-high pile of debris. For him, time stopped at 4:17 am on February 6.

Mustafa Kazazz used a sledgehammer to single-handedly dig a tunnel through the rubble of his family’s home. Despite his heroic efforts, he was only able to recover the bodies of his mother and sister. (TRTWorld)

Kazazz is a translator and works in Trabzon as a tour guide — a somewhat better-paying job than he would have found in Antakya that has helped him save enough money to support his family from afar.

Upon hearing the news of the twin earthquakes, he drove back to his hometown with a friend in a rented car and reached the seven-story residential building where his family lived — on the first floor — within a day. He pushed through the chaos and traffic jams while information about the scale of the disaster slowly trickled in.

“I found a sledgehammer and frantically began to dig a hole,” he says. Kazazz was able to find the bodies of his mother and one sister — those were the only ones his bulky body allowed him to reach as he crawled into crevices in the rubble.

He attended the funeral of his mother and sister, who were buried in a government-managed graveyard carved out for the earthquake victims in the Narlica neighborhood.

At times, Kazazz finds himself hoping against hope, convincing himself that his brother might still be alive underneath the rubble.

“My brother is a strong guy. I know he can make it,” he says, his voice drowned by the noise of the excavators and other digging machines being used by AFAD to break heavy concrete slabs.

Although the window of opportunity for rescues closed over a week ago, Kazazz’s hope to see his brother alive is a clear symptom of his grief.

Just two days before the disaster hit the nation, Kazazz had come to see his family in Antakya after an absence of two long years. “I couldn’t come here often enough because I was the one making a living and supporting the household,” he says.

Despite the danger, Mustafa Kazazz remains steadfast in his determination to give a proper burial to his loved ones who are still lost in the rubble. (TRTWorld)

His mother had found a match for him named Fatima. The duo got engaged during the last week of January. On his short visit just before the earthquakes, he and his mother went shopping for gold and discussed other arrangements for his forthcoming marriage.

He returned to Trabzon on February 5 — a day before the earthquakes struck.  His would-be bride also died, and her body was found buried in rubble in another neighborhood.

On February 20, Kazazz stood outside his tent watching AFAD workers pull 11 bodies out from the rubble of a building that had stood next to his family’s home. The bodies were found lying under what would have been a stairwell, indicating that the victims might have attempted to rush out down the stairs, but weren’t able to make it out in time.

Observing the corpses, Kazazz felt he might be getting closer to giving his remaining family members proper burials. But a few hours later, when yet another earthquake struck Hatay on Monday evening, shaking the broken buildings and debris left behind by the initial quakes just two weeks earlier, workers excavating the rubble of his home ran for their lives — as did everyone else.

“I lost my whole family in one day… Allah, please don’t do this to someone else,” he says, breaking into tears as a gust of wind blows dirt into the air.

By Wednesday afternoon, he was standing his ground, steadfast in his commitment to finding the bodies of his loved ones. But no word came from the AFAD workers as they continued removing the debris with care.

“My mother wanted me to get married so badly. She wanted to see her grandchildren,” he says. “I wasn’t able to fulfill her wish. I will live with that regret for the rest of my life.”

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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.

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Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson offered condolences to the people of Afghanistan over the loss of lives in the recent earthquake, voicing the readiness of Iran to provide any assistance to victims.

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The Rodney family is one of many affected by the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on August 14, leaving at least 2,207 people dead.

The Rodneys lost the matriarch of the family and five other members when their house collapsed, and the surviving members now live in a vacant lot next to what was once a school for boys where they have improvised a small camp.

Three children, all under 5 years of age, are playing at the camp — they easily fit into the small, makeshift shelter amid the rubble that the older family members constructed to keep out the rain.

Poor road conditions and extreme weather, including the tropical storm Grace which threatened to dump more than 25 cm of rainfall over the areas hit hardest by the earthquake, rendered delivery of already scarce aid difficult.

At least 600 families are seeking refuge at the Land des Gabion stadium in Les Cayes. They hammered stakes into the ground and covered them with sheets or plastic as ceilings and walls to build temporary shelters.

A person in charge of managing the stadium said that there was almost no food, drinking water, or medicine. Whenever it rains, he said, the space becomes a quagmire, and whenever there is extreme heat, it is difficult to protect children and the elderly.

The adults in the stadium have been busy cooking, washing clothes, and continuing to adapt the place to suit their needs, while children are playing football nearby with a small, nearly flat ball or engaged in games of tag.

The little ones stopped the game every time someone new arrived, but soon, they let go of their fears, screaming and laughing as they played.

Humanitarian needs remain urgent, but people in the hard-hit Les Cayes and the surrounding areas are optimistic about overcoming adverse circumstances.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/23/c_1310143523.htm

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The 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the Indonesian city on 28 September 2018, taking the lives of over 4,300 people, making it the deadliest earthquake in the world that year.

Writing in Nature Geoscience, researchers from NTU Singapore’s Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) and the Asian School of the Environment (ASE), together with collaborators from institutions in Indonesia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Australia, reveal that the landslides in Indonesia’s Palu Valley resulted from widespread liquefaction in areas that were heavily irrigated for rice cultivation.

A century-old aqueduct, constructed to bring enough water into the Palu Valley to irrigate rice, artificially raised the water table to almost ground level. This elevation increased the potential for liquefaction—a situation where buried sediment becomes fluid-like due to strong seismic ground-shaking.

The combination of this fluid-like sediment and the slope of the valley floor exacerbated the catastrophe, creating wide lateral spreading of water, landslides, and debris, which swept through the villages.

This deadly cocktail marked Indonesia´s deadliest earthquake since Yogyakarta in 2006.

“This event is a wake-up call for any area where active faults and irrigation coincide,” said Dr. Kyle Bradley, a principal investigator at NTU’s EOS who led the research.

“We need to improve the awareness and understanding of liquefaction-related landslides and pay closer attention to places where irrigation has artificially raised the water table, said Dr. Bradley, who is also a lecturer at NTU’s ASE.

The research highlights the urgency for Southeast Asian nation-states to review locations with intensive rice farming activities which lie among active faults.

Dr. Bradley said, “This is of particular concern in Southeast Asia as the pace of development is often faster than the return time of large earthquakes—the average time period between one earthquake and the next. Most other similarly irrigated areas have not yet been tested by extreme ground shaking, and some of those areas could also pose a major hazard.”

Research used historic and current satellite data

By analysing satellite images taken before and after the earthquake to identify areas affected by landslides, NTU researchers discovered that irrigated paddies and fields were strongly affected, while areas planted with trees were more stable.

This suggested that heavy irrigation and a raised water table were responsible for creating a new liquefaction hazard.

“Hazards that are created by humans can often be more readily moderated than other natural hazards. Based on the relative resiliency of areas planted with mixed tree crops and irrigated fields, we propose that more intermixed planting could decrease the hazard of large landslides in the future,” said Dr. Bradley.

The satellite image mapping was complemented by field observations of the landslides and of the local irrigation system and practices, produced by an international team of scientists led by Dr. Ella Meilianda of the Tsunami and Disaster Mitigation Research Center at Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh.

Professor Thomas Dunne of the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not affiliated with the study, said “The study has demonstrated how Earth scientists with strong field-based understanding of land surface mechanics can use the rapidly growing toolbox of remote sensing to analyse dangerous processes. The landscape-scale survey approach could be applied elsewhere for systematic assessment and avoidance of dangers that are often overlooked when large infrastructure is first proposed in rapidly developing, but potentially unstable terrains.”

The research team plans to continue their study by assessing the effects of local land use on outcomes during the Palu earthquake.

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