The Freezing Shock of Disaster

At 2:25 p.m. last Wednesday, walls began to shake and buckle in Muradiye, a hardscrabble, mud-and-stone mountain town near the Turko-Iranian border. Soon houses were crumbling across an area of 300 sq. mi. The worst Turkish earthquake in nearly 40 years, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale,* had convulsed the eastern part of the country, with Muradiye at its epicenter. At week's end it was estimated that 5,000 people had died in the quake and its aftershocks; countless thousands of others were suffering from hunger and exposure.

Rescue workers could only guess at the actual extent of devastation on the remote, snow-covered slopes 600 miles east of Ankara, though past experience with tremors in the earthquake-prone region has taught them to expect the worst. Last year a quake hit the area, leaving 3,000 dead. In 1939 another seismic catastrophe took 30,000 lives. This time more than 120 towns and villages were affected, some of them isolated by 8 in. of snow on the narrow mountain roads. In the settlement of Alikelle, only two people survived out of 70 families. In the town of Caldiran, where 2,023 people once lived, only one structure remained standing: an army officers' billet.

The 150,000-strong Turkish Third Army, stationed along the nearby Russian frontier, was pressed into the rescue operation, along with helicopter and air force units. But relief efforts during the first 24 hours were badly muddled. A gasoline shortage hindered rescuers until the government released emergency supplies. Drugs were in chronically short supply. Hundreds of bottles of freshly donated blood were left behind in Istanbul because Turkish airline authorities were unable to provide air transport for delivery. The reason: many of their planes were en route to Saudi Arabia, loaded with Moslem pilgrims intent on making the hadj. Only 400 tents and 470 blankets could be provided in the first stages of the rescue mission; survivors huddling against the 10DEG F. cold were forced to huddle around fires amid the wreckage of their homes.

It was not long, however, before a stream of international aid began to supplement the Turkish efforts. A fleet of 25 U.S. military cargo planes ferried tents, blankets, stoves and fuel from Europe. Iran, West Germany, Italy and other nations added similar supplies, plus medicine and blood plasma. Saudi Arabia pledged $5 million to the relief effort. The Turkish government announced that survivors who wished to move would be settled outside the quake area, in schools and student hostels. Due to the frozen ground in eastern Turkey, reconstruction of the shattered homes is unlikely to start before spring.

* A quake measuring 7.5 struck Guatemala in February, leaving 19,000 dead; the heavily populated Tientsin area of China was ravaged by an 8.2 quake in July, with an unknown death toll also estimated in thousands.

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