One of the latest people to be detained was Ibrahim Mustafa Uncuoglu, a contractor of a collapsed building in the southern city of Gaziantep, Anadolu reported. Bekir Bozdag, Turkey’s justice minister, said on Sunday that legal proceedings against more than 130 people were underway over their apparent ties to collapsed buildings. A week after a powerful quake struck Turkey and Syria, the combined death toll surpassed 35,000. With more than a million homeless in Turkey alone, there is a despe
One week after a powerful earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, a severe shortage of tents, housing and medical supplies is imperiling relief efforts and posing new dangers to survivors, many of them injured or living outdoors in extreme cold.
The death toll for both countries surpassed 35,000 on Monday, with more than one million people in Turkey alone left homeless.
One of the most urgent needs was temporary shelter for the homeless in Turkey, which is in short supply. The Turkish Red Crescent, a humanitarian organization, said it was speeding up the production of tents to house those displaced after Turkish news media reported a shortage of temporary housing and poor sanitary conditions for the homeless.
While aid is flowing into Turkey, relatively little has reached opposition-held parts of northern Syria because of political divisions on the ground after years of civil war. And much of the aid that did go in to Syria did not always contain the most urgently needed supplies, such as food. Inside Turkey, damaged roads in the quake zone and closed airports over the past week in some areas have also slowed the flow of aid.
As President of Turkey came under criticism for his government’s response to the earthquake, the country’s deadliest since 1939, Turkish officials on Monday detained more property developers and others suspected of having a hand in shoddy construction that violated existing building codes, according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency. Experts have said that poor construction most likely exacerbated the deadliness of the earthquake.
rate need for temporary housing.