Tourists get rude awakening
KOS: A powerful earthquake killed two people on the Greek holiday island of Kos in the early hours of yesterday, sending tourists fleeing into the streets and causing disruption in the nearby Turkish tourist hub of Bodrum.
A Turkish and a Swedish tourist, aged 39 and 22 years, died when the roof of a bar collapsed, Greek police said.
Kos’s port was put out of action and across the strait a small tsunami damaged vehicles which were parked near Bodrum’s shore.
On Kos, about 115 people were injured, including tourists of various nationalities, 12 of them seriously. More than 350 people visited hospitals in Turkey, although most had only light injuries.
The quake struck at 1.31am and many of Kos’s tourists spent the rest of the night in the open as a precaution, hotel owners said.
“All of a sudden, it felt like a train was going right through the room,” said Vernon Hausman, a German who was holidaying on Kos.
“I told my son: ‘Looks like an earthquake, so let’s get the hell out of here.’”
Greek authorities said the 12 people seriously injured on Kos included tourists from Tur- key, Sweden and Norway. Four were transferred to Crete and three to Athens.
One person was in a critical condition, while a Swedish tourist lost a leg, the director of the hospital in Crete told Greek Skai TV.
Turkish and Greek authorities put the magnitude at 6.3 and 6.6 respectively and reported several aftershocks, with one estimated at 5.1.
The US Geological Survey located the epicentre of the main earthquake in the Aegean Sea, 10km south-east of Bodrum and about 16km from Kos’s main port.
Hotel owners in Bodrum said some tourists were checking out.
“It was a lucky escape and it could have been much worse,” said Issa Kamara, a 38-yearold personal trainer at the Maca Kizi hotel in Bodrum’s upmarket Turkbuku area.
Constantina Svynou, head of the hoteliers’ association in Kos, said: “There are about 200 000 tourists on the island – we are at the peak season.
“Our first reaction was to calm the tourists, following basic rules.” – dpa