Desperate hunt for survivors as Turkish quake toll reaches 432

Hopes faded Tuesday of finding more survivors as rescuers under floodlights scrabbled desperately through the rubble of an earthquake that killed at least hundreds of people in eastern Turkey.

The death toll rose to 432 , with 1,352 people injured, the Disaster and Emergency Administration said in a statement on Tuesday.

It also said 2,262 buildings collapsed in the quake, which struck Van province on Sunday afternoon with a magnitude of 7.2. The crisis centre said overnight the death toll was at 279.

The rescue workers scrambled to find survivors as tens of thousands of people spent a second night under canvas, in cars or huddled round small fires in towns rattled by aftershocks.

Casualties were concentrated so far in the town of Ercis and the provincial capital Van, with officials still checking outlying areas.

Seven people were rescued overnight, broadcaster CNN Turk reported.

“It was like the judgment day,” said Mesut Ozan Yilmaz, 18, who survived for 32 hours under the rubble of a tea house where he had been passing time with friends, Reuters reported.

Unhurt but lying on a hospital bed under a thick blanket, his face still blackened by dust and dirt, Yilmaz gave a chilling account to CNN Turk of how he survived by diving under a table.

“The space we had was so narrow. People were fighting for more space to survive,” Yilmaz said. “I rested my head on a dead man's foot. I know I would be dead now if I had let myself go psychologically.”

As grieving families prepared on Tuesday to bury their dead, others kept vigil by the mounds of concrete rubble and masonry, praying rescue teams would find missing loved ones alive.

The Disaster and Emergency Administration said 1,301 people had been injured and 2,262 buildings had collapsed.

“I am still trembling (because of fear)... As long as those aftershocks go on, we will stay in the street,” Gulizar, a Kurdish woman in her 40s, told AFP as she tried to keep warm in front of a makeshift fire in Van city centre.

With night-time temperatures expected to dip to two degrees Celsius (36 Fahrenheit) and snow forecast for Wednesday, residents took shelter anyway they could -- some in cars, some in tents and some under only a blanket.

“We couldn’t understand what was going on -- all of a sudden there was dust everywhere, our eyes were full of dust, and we were thrown against the walls and furniture. It lasted 20 seconds,” said 23-year-old Ercis resident Yunus Ozmen as he recounted the moment disaster struck.

In Van city, the desperately sad and pleading eyes of a 34-year-old man whose nine-month-old nephew was lying beneath piles of rubble spoke volumes. “We recovered his baby bed,” he told AFP.

“God willing we will find him alive too,” he said, without diverting his eyes from the scene where rescue operations continued nonstop for two days. The man said his brother, the baby’s father, was also under the collapsed building.

Rescue teams concentrated efforts in Ercis, a town of 100,000 that was worst hit by the 7.2 magnitude tremor.

The Turkish Red Crescent distributed up to 13,000 tents, and was preparing to provide temporary shelter for about 40,000 people, although there were no reliable estimates of the number of people left destitute.

The relief agency was criticized for failing to ensure that some of the most needy, particularly in villages, received tents as temperatures plummeted overnight.

“We were sent 25 tents for 150 homes. Everybody is waiting outside, we've got small children, we've got nothing left,” said Ahmet Arikes, the 60-year-old headman of Amik, a village outside Van that was reduced to rubble.

“Our house was badly damaged. We will live like this maybe for one or two weeks,” said 34-year-old Zuleyha, who was staying in her car with her husband and five-year-old son.

Television images showed desperate men pushing each other roughly to grab tents from the back of a Red Crescent truck.

“I didn’t think the Red Crescent was successful enough in giving away tents. There is a problem on that matter,” Huseyin Celik, deputy chairman of the ruling AK Party, told CNN Turk. “I apologize to our people.”

Soon after, the relief agency’s chairman told the news channel that 12,000 more tents would be delivered to Van on Tuesday. Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, overseeing relief operations in Van, said: “From today there will be nothing our people lack.”

Whatever the shortcomings of the relief operation, the disaster posed little risk to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who secured a third consecutive term with a strong majority at a national election in June.

The trauma of the quake is one more problem to bear for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in southeast Turkey, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.

“We escaped from terrorism but now we are faced with an earthquake,” said Osman Bayram, a 26-year-old teacher, who had move to Van from a more restive part of the southeast.

The center of Van, a city of 1 million people, resembled a ghost town with no lights in the streets or buildings. Hardly any people could be seen.

The sense of dislocation was greater in Ercis. With no homes to return to, thousands of people, mostly men, paced the streets, stopping to look at the destruction or whenever there was some commotion at a rescue operation site.

At one collapsed building on the main road leading through Ercis, the area worst hit in Sunday's quake, exhausted rescue workers shouted at crowds of men pushing forward to catch a glimpse as efforts were made to free the corpse of a woman from the rubble.

“Get back! Are you not human? Show some respect! Do we not have any honor or pride?” one rescue worker yelled, according to Reuters.

Iran, which felt the tremor as well in its northwestern cities, had sent rescuers and equipment.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou on Monday said his country “stands ready” to help and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, with whom relations have become frosty over the past year, telephoned Erdogan to tell him that Israel “is ready to help Turkey in this painful time,” Anatolia reported.

In 1999, two strong quakes in northwest Turkey’s heavily populated and industrialized regions left some 20,000 dead. A powerful earthquake in the town of Caldiran in Van province killed 3,840 people in 1976.