Powerful earthquake leaves more than 80 dead

More than 80 people were confirmed dead by Thursday evening following a powerful earthquake that shook eastern Turkey early the same morning. "Confirmed deaths stand at 82 but the death toll could still rise, 93 people are still under the rubble, time is running out," Oktay Ergunay, a Turkish Red Crescent official, told IRIN in Bingol as rescue work continued frantically. Upwards of 1,000 people are feared injured in the quake that measured 6.4 on the Richter scale. The number of dead and injured is likely to rise as the full picture of the devastation unfolds in coming days. Communications and power lines to outlying areas around the epicentre have been severely disrupted. The earthquake was centered just north of the town of Bingol, 700 km east of the Turkish capital Ankara. Villages up to 50 km from the epicentre have also been badly damaged. Rescuers toiled all day in the rubble of a school dormitory in the village of Celtiksuyu, 20 km from Bingol, hunting for dozens of children believed trapped. More than 70 children had already been saved from the debris of the dormitory. But at least 80 children from the school are still missing, Ergunay added. Rescue work continued into the night at the dormitory site aided by floodlights and sniffer dogs, as anxious relatives looked on. Rescue work has been hampered by the more than 100 aftershocks that hit the region following the initial tremor. Many of Bingol’s 70,000 residents were out in the open Thursday night fearing further tremors as rescue work continued. Parts of the town are without electricity. Three tented areas have been set aside to offer some shelter with a further 8 planned for the region if there is a need. Mutalip Golcuklu, an education ministry official in Bingol, told IRIN most of the 30 schools in the town had been damaged by the quake as well as many government buildings.

A large number of schools in the area were badly damaged

The majority of the buildings flattened by the quake, including the school dormitory, were newly constructed, an eerie reminder of when two powerful earthquakes struck western Turkey in 1999, killing some 18,000 people. "Many died because of bad buildings with no provision for earthquakes," Ovuz Gunduglu of Istanbul University's geophysics department told IRIN. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the quake area, and said proper inspections had not been carried out and that shoddy material had been used to build the school. "Investigations will be launched and the guilty will be prosecuted," news agencies quoted him as saying. The Turkish Red Crescent has sent at least 3,000 tents and 13,000 blankets, as well as mobile kitchens, generators, ambulances, and four mt of food supplies. Soldiers, emergency workers and mountaineers with rescue experience are also headed to the area. Turkey has not requested international assistance, although a number of countries, including Norway, Spain and France have put emergency teams on standby to travel to the quake zone. View the photo gallery