San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
EARTHQUAKE SURVIVORS DESPERATELY HUNT FOR SHELTER
Turkish government offering tents and shipping containers
Two weeks ago, Lutfiye Yuce hosted a 30th birthday party for her daughter Yesim in the southern Turkish city of Antakya. She bought an iced cake and invited a handful of neighbors.
Three days later, the neighbors returned in the middle of the night to untangle Yesim from under her home, which had caved into the shaking mountainside that cradles the city.
“It was as if the ground was boiling,” said Yuce, 66, recalling how the earth shuddered as her son carried her daughter’s body down from the mountain.
She and her son sheltered in a cave for days before joining neighbors in a tent encampment beside an ancient monastery. They are among an estimated 1 million Turkish people left homeless by the earthquake this month that decimated a wide swath of Turkey and western Syria.
“I had everything, and I now I have nothing,” said Yuce, who noted that she had also lost a son in the earthquake. She has four surviving children, she said, and they are all homeless. “I can never return there again — but what can I do? I have nowhere to go.”
More than 40,000 people in Turkey died in the earthquake and a powerful aftershock. About 47,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged, sending more than 1 million people into temporary shelters, according to the International Rescue Committee. And millions more remain in need of food, shelter, electricity, water and toilets. Many have spent almost two weeks in the open air, sometimes braving freezing weather.
The Turkish government, along with relief workers from agencies like the Red Crescent and the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, are scrambling to meet the challenge of housing people across quake-hit areas of Turkey.
A park in the city of Adiyaman has become a distribution point for survivors, packed with tents set up by the Turkish national emergency management agency, AFAD. The picnic areas are full of volunteers cooking giant vats of soup, while others hand out water, diapers, blankets, milk, cookies and nonperishable food.
Resting under some trees was Erdal Akaslan and his wife, Selman Akaslan. The house where they lived with their three children had been damaged in the earthquake, so they were outside for a day before Erdal Akaslan found plastic sheeting and wood to build a makeshift tent in an empty lot. They had not been able to get an AFAD tent.
“I asked 50 times and could not get a tent,” he said.
Conditions are generally worse for many of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees who live in the quake zone in Turkey.
In the town of Besni, Mohammed Makhzoum, 31, said he, his wife and their three children had barely escaped their house during the earthquake. They met up with other Syrian families in their area, and many of them settled at the tree nursery where Makhzoum worked.
There were multiple families there, and he estimated that scores of women and children were packed into the nursery’s three-room building. For the first few nights, the men and boys stayed uncovered outside, but then the nursery owner brought them a large tent to sleep in.
They were in a small town and received no aid from the government.
In response to growing public frustration over his government’s relief efforts, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he intends to construct enough “high-quality and safe buildings within one year” in order to “meet the housing needs across the entire earthquake zone.”
For now, the government is relying on a raft of shortterm solutions: Repurposed shipping containers are popping up like impromptu trailer parks. Gymnasiums, hotels and university dormitories have been packed with people. A cruise ship is set to arrive in Iskenderun to accommodate thousands of Syrian refugees in Turkey.
The road out of Antakya offers a panorama of the outpouring of support for survivors. Cars piled with bags of clothing from local charities weave around tractors pushing debris. Mobile kitchens advertising soup and tea trail ambulances and trucks stacked with sacks of rice and flour.
So far, at least 368,874 tents have been sent to the quake zone, of which 172,265 have been erected, AFAD said Thursday. The government has also repurposed 5,400 shipping containers for housing, and at least 890,000 people are being housed in state-run dormitories and facilities. About 50,000 victims are in hotels, Erdogan said Tuesday.