Buried Alive

By Johanna McGeary

Every hour counts when people are buried alive. At 3:02 a.m. last Tuesday, the ground shook violently for 45 sec. under northwestern Turkey, entombing tens of thousands of sleeping families. When dawn broke, the fierce August sun burned down on hundreds of square miles of earthquake-ravaged cities and towns. The densely populated industrial heartland of the country lay in ruin, some 40,000 buildings smashed by nature's power into mountains of shattered concrete and sharp, mangled steel. Ghostly voices cried out from dark holes beneath the rubble, pleading for rescue.

In the race to save the living, men with bulldozers and jackhammers and bare hands clawed into the dangerously teetering piles. Disaster experts from abroad, volunteers from around the country, neighbors from the next street dug desperately to reach the faint sounds of life still echoing from the debris. Here a frail three-year-old girl was pulled out, barely moving but alive. There a woman was extricated, still breathing, after rescuers spent eight hours delicately prying away the fallen slabs. At every dusty mound that was once an apartment house, survivors pleaded for help in finding loved ones. "My brother is still there," says Ozgur Taylan, 12, pointing to the remains of the building where he lived in the gutted town of Golcuk. Ozgur and his mother escaped with no time to spare. "I thought I was going to die."

The extent of the damage rapidly overwhelmed the Turkish government's capacity to respond. Search teams came pouring in from abroad, hundreds of specialists from the U.S., Europe, Israel, Russia, even traditional enemy Greece. Yet hope dwindled for the estimated 35,000 people who may remain locked in the wreckage of Turkey's punishing earthquake. After the first three days, successful rescues grew more and more sporadic. Without water, in the cruel heat, few of the trapped can survive more than 72 hrs., no matter how strong the will to live. There might still be a miracle or two. But the hopelessness for the rest reverberated in the trembling voice of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit as he acknowledged, "It is not possible to reach them all."

Two thousand dead. Four thousand dead. Ten thousand dead. Ten thousand injured, 18,000, 34,000. As the tolls rose each day, the figures grew numbing, the magnitude of the disaster hard to grasp. Almost 100,000 Turks left homeless; $20 billion lost in property and production; a sense of despair overtaking the country. THE PEOPLE ARE HELPLESS, THE STATE IS HELPLESS, WE CAN'T EVEN FIND ANYWHERE TO PUT OUR DEAD, read the headline in the Sabah newspaper.

Amid the grim, impersonal regularity of natural disasters, we are often unmoved by statistics. It is the individual snapshots that bring Turkey's tragedy home. In the devastated town of Duzce, a British rescuer wedged deep in a narrow crevice heard a tap-tap-tap so close he could almost touch whoever was making the sound. Then an aftershock cascaded masonry through the 30-ft. tunnel as the rescuers slithered back out. When they took another route and reached the spot where the tapping had been heard, two dead bodies lay there. "It hurts when it ends like this," team leader Ray Gray told the Times of London. "But you have to push on."

In Golcuk, Midhat Ozgun watched angrily as rescue teams with winches passed by the collapsed seven-story building where his cousin Ahmed Bulte had lived on the fifth floor with his wife. "We had to stand bodily in the road to get one to stop and help us," said Ozgun. For four hours, he and several French aid workers pulled apart blocks of concrete, uncovering the air pocket where the Bultes had lain safely beneath two dead bodies for 84 hrs. Ozgun wept for joy at their survival, but he was still angry as he looked around. "There are so many apartment blocks here where there has been no help."

As Friday night came to Izmit, the largest city near the quake's epicenter, an experienced search-and-rescue team from Fairfax County, Va., gathered up its dogs and fiber-optic sensor cables, convinced there was no one left alive to save. Yilmaz Yildirim begged the team to go on combing through a pancaked building for more of his family. His sister had been pulled out alive the day before, her 26-year-old son retrieved dead. Yildirim was sure he could hear an alarm clock ringing, a signal that might be coming from his missing uncle and cousin. He was not ready to come to terms with disappointment. As the Americans departed, he rounded up bystanders to help heave away twisted beams perched precariously atop the rubble.

Very soon there will be no more survivors to find. The ruins are giving up the dead now--children frozen in sleep, adults contorted in terror, corpses beginning to decay. The stench of putrefying flesh choked the air in hard-hit centers like Izmit, Golcuk and Yalova as bodies were stacked in overflowing morgues, refrigerated trucks, an ice rink. Eager to bury the dead for health reasons and to follow Muslim custom, government authorities photographed victims for later identification, then quickly interred them in mass graves.

The country remains ill equipped to cope with the shocks. After its worst tremor since a quake took 30,000 lives in 1939, terror and grief soon gave way to rage and recrimination. Survivors blamed government authorities and the 450,000-strong army for worsening the devastation by failing to provide effective rescue workers and equipment. When help did arrive in shattered communities, officials could not adequately deploy it. Most services, from water and power to health and sanitation, were a shambles, raising the threat of disease outbreaks.

Public outrage quickly focused on the substandard apartment blocks that boosted the quake's toll. Most of the dead were crushed as they slept when their cheap, hastily built housing crumpled. Newspapers pointed at greedy contractors who used shoddy materials, slipshod methods and the help of corrupt officials to bypass building codes and ignore quake-proofing requirements. Block after block of flimsy flats, thrown up to accommodate rural migrants to the cities, collapsed while solid buildings withstood the temblor with barely a crack. In Yalova, where scores of apartment houses virtually disintegrated, citizens nearly lynched the local builder and set his car on fire. "The contractors who put up these buildings have committed mass murder," said Interior Minister Saadettin Tantan on Thursday as officials promised harsh punishment

That will bring no consolation to the families of the dead. Nor will survivors find it easy to remake their lives amid the country's troubled economy and embattled government. Yet hardest of all for the traumatized people of Turkey may be regaining the simplest of faiths: trust in the stability of the ground beneath their feet.

--With reporting by Andrew Finkel/Izmit

With reporting by Andrew Finkel/Izmit