Two powerful earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria, killing almost 2,000 people and leaving scores injured and displaced.
The earthquake also shut down crude oil flow to a regional export terminal.
According to Turkey’s disaster response management agency, the earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 hit the Turkish city of Gaziantep on Monday morning and a second measured at 7.6 struck closeby nine hours later.
The earthquakes left about 1,500 people dead in Turkey, while over 460 died in Syria.
The quake created massive destruction in its demise with millions of people out in the cold without heating gas, electricity, or gasoline for their cars. Among them were many of Turkey’s 3.7 million registered Syrian refugees, the biggest refugee population in the world.
According to the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “Turkey is facing “the strongest disaster in a century.”
Over 8,500 people were injured in Turkey and 1,000 others in Syria. At least four Turkish airports were damaged. More than 2,800 buildings have collapsed in Turkey with many people alive and trapped inside the rubbles.
Turkey also stopped oil flows to the Ceyhan export terminal on the Mediterranean coast as a precaution, although no leaks were detected on the pipelines feeding crude oil to the facility. However, it hopes to restore gas flows within 48 hours.
According to reports, the first quake was felt as far as Egypt and Cyprus. It was the worst in Turkey since a 1939 earthquake that killed about 33,000 people.
In 1999, tremors hit Turkey’s industrial hub near Turkey’s largest, Istanbul, within months, killing over 18,000 people. That disaster hugely affected the center-left coalition then, resulting in a deep financial crisis that helped Erdogan’s AK Party come to power.
Today, Erdogan mobilized 9,000 first responders and said Turkey was looking to receive help from 45 countries, along with NATO and the European Union.
The earthquake had a huge economic impact on Turkey affecting areas that generate about one-tenth of the country’s income. According to authorities, facilities damaged include; airports in Adiyaman, Kahramanmaras, Malatya, and Hatay, as well as some hospitals, highways, and a port.
Turkey’s stock exchange Borsa Istanbul stopped trading some stocks and the main index fell as much as 4.5%. The Turkish lira was little changed at 18.83 per dollar.
