Furious Shudder

An earthquake kills 1,339

Shortly after dawn, Ismail Kamkas was, as usual, feeding the cows in his barn. Suddenly he felt the earth beneath him shudder and heard a tremendous roar. Thrown clear of the crumbling walls, he looked up to see his house in ruins. Scrambling frantically through the stones and splintered timbers, Kamkas, managed to rescue his father and two of his children. But his wife and two other children could not be saved. As heavy sleet, then snow began to fall, Kamkas, sat through the night beside the rubble that had been his home. "All day long, we tried to find our families," he later recalled. "And all night long, we stayed with our dead." Throughout his desolate farming village of Muratbagi last week, the toll of dead, mostly women and children who were still indoors after the men left to work in the fields, continued to mount. The earthquake killed more than half of the village's 980 inhabitants, reducing the settlement to a heap of lonely rocks on the hillside.

Muratbagi was just one of 44 villages in mountainous eastern Turkey that suffered serious damage from the quake, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. By week's end the total number of dead had reached 1,339, nearly twice as many as in the celebrated San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The shock even succeeded in overshadowing the campaigning for Turkey's first national elections since the military seized power in 1980.

Last week's devastation was, however, tragically familiar to the villages that lie along the East Anatolian Fault. More than 20,000 people perished after one momentous jolt in 1939, and two quakes in the past decade each left more than 2,000 dead. One reason for the terrible toll: the walls of peasant homes are typically made of rough stones held together with a mixture of mud and straw, while their roofs consist of layers of soil as much as four feet thick. When the earth rumbles, the rocks come loose and the roof collapses. Anyone inside is buried alive.

Although army helicopters arrived within two hours of the quake to begin evacuating the wounded, many who endured the initial shock may have suffocated to death. Further aggravating rescue efforts, the narrow dirt road that links Muratbagi to the outside world was blocked for hours by landslides. By the time rescue workers from the Swiss Disaster Relief brought in 15 specially trained dogs to sniff out more victims, most of those unearthed had stopped breathing.

The Turks worked valiantly to cut their losses. Army troops stationed near the Soviet border within 100 miles of the afflicted area rushed 7,000 pup tents, 26,000 blankets and ten tons of tea to the stricken villagers. After the daily newspaper Hurriyet printed a front-page photo of two young girls forlornly searching for their parents, it was flooded with calls from readers offering to adopt orphaned survivors. The government also received promises of several donations from abroad, including $10 million from Saudi Arabia and more than $2 million worth of supplies from the U.S.

But with winter approaching and 33,000 villagers left homeless, prospects for those who remain are chilling. Already there have been reports from isolated villages of families having to fend off packs of wolves descending on their dead animals. With 30,000 of the area's livestock killed, even the farmers who weather the crisis may find themselves stripped of their livelihood. Survivors in Muratbagi last week spent every day laying the bodies of loved ones to rest and every night shivering in the cold. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.