The Washington Post, Today's Worldview by Adam Taylor : Four reasons the earthquake rescue has been so painfully difficult and more....

 

By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall  Email   Four reasons the earthquake rescue has been so painfully difficult Women react at the site of a collapsed building in the aftermath of a major earthquake in the Elbistan district of Kahramanmaras, Turkey, on Wednesday. (Sedat Suna/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) Days after the earthquake hit southern Turkey, rescue efforts are still going on across the region. And despite significant pledges of international aid, these efforts have been painfully difficult. The death toll across Syria and Turkey stood at over 12,000 on Wednesday, already marking it as one of the deadliest natural disasters of the 21st century. It could get worse as the days drag on, with many people still believed to be stuck under rubble and rescue teams reporting supply issues and logistical problems. Why can’t these rescue efforts go faster? It certainly isn’t because of the efforts of the rescue teams, who have been working through the night in shocking conditions. Instead, there are four major reasons — a combination of bad luck and bad politics that fused to make a perfect storm. 1. The earthquake impacted a huge area of land where lots of people live. Monday morning’s earthquake and aftershocks were so large that there was damage hundreds of miles away in Beirut and Damascus, Syria. Residents in Egypt even felt its shakes. The earthquake, believed to have happened due to events in the East Anatolian fault system, had an epicenter near the town of Gaziantep in southern Turkey. It was measured as a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and then there were a series of large aftershocks — the largest, a 7.5 magnitude temblor around 60 miles away from of the original epicenter, was so big that some seismologists consider it a separate earthquake. The epicenter of the initial earthquake was relatively shallow too, about 11 miles underground according to U.S. Geological Survey. As The Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson wrote earlier this week, “that means the seismic waves did not have to travel far before they reached buildings and people on the surface, leading to more intense shaking.” Despite the risk of earthquakes in the region, this is a highly populated area. The World Health Organization has estimated that 23 million people live in the impacted areas of Turkey and Syria. Almost all who lived in the region had not experienced a major earthquake within their lifetime, with most recent earthquakes in Turkey in different areas. “It’s difficult to watch this tragedy unfold, especially since we’ve known for a long time that the buildings in the region were not designed to withstand earthquakes,” USGS scientist David Wald said in a statement. 2. It came in the middle of the night at a time of unusually cold weather. The first earthquake hit at around 4:15 a.m. local time. This meant that people were not congregated in schools, offices or markets, but spread out in apartments or houses. There’s another reason many people were inside: The area has been seeing an abnormal cold front, with temperatures as much as 15 degrees below average for this time of year, with freezing lows. Turkey’s General Directorate of Meteorology tweeted this week that temperatures are expected to be below seasonal norms through at least Feb. 14. Severe winter temperatures cause major complications for rescue efforts, significantly raising the risk that any survivors of the quake could die from exposure before being rescued. With many using their bare hands to move rubble, the cold impacts rescue teams, too. And even once rescued, there is little adequate shelter. In many parts of Turkey and especially Syria, too, electricity remains out and gas supplies, widely used to heat homes, are destroyed or dwindling. “We don’t have a tent, we don’t have a heating stove, we don’t have anything. Our children are in bad shape. We are all getting wet under the rain and our kids are out in the cold,” 27-year-old Aysan Kurt told reporters from the Associated Press in Turkey. “We did not die from hunger or the earthquake, but we will die freezing from the cold.” 3. Its epicenter was a border region already touched by conflict and war. The ill effects of the nearly 12-year-long Syrian civil war loom over the region with devastating cost, in particular in the parts of northern Syria that remain outside of government control. In these rebel-held parts of Syria, rescue work is done not by the state but by various nonstate actors — most notably, the White Helmets, an aid group that has been supported by Britain, the United States and other international groups. The regions have already been decimated by frequent shelling and brutal fighting. The earthquake is only the latest humanitarian disaster to impact the region. In a statement, International Rescue Committee President and CEO David Miliband said that even “24 hours before the catastrophe, over 15 million Syrians were already in need of humanitarian assistance, more than at any other time since the conflict began” in 2011. Across the border in Turkey, there are an estimated 3.6 million refugees, including many who lived in sprawling refugee camps near badly hit cities like Gaziantep. Last year, Human Rights Watch warned that many lived in perilous conditions due to legal employment restrictions and rising xenophobia in Turkey. “We do not know the exact number of refugees impacted and we might not for some days, but we fear the number might be significant, given the epicenter of the quake was close to areas with high concentrations of refugees,” Matthew Saltmarsh, spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency told AFP this week. 4. Political divisions loom over the rescue efforts. The Syrian government is a pariah in much of the West for widespread human rights abuses during the civil war. Many nations, including the United States, have placed economic sanctions on it. Though most of these sanctions carve out exceptions for humanitarian assistance. In the past, international aid groups reached rebel-held northern Syria through a border crossing in Turkey called Bab al-Hawa. However, as my colleagues reported today, the earthquake has effectively cut that link. “The road connecting the city of Gaziantep to the crossing is in one of the most damaged areas and is currently inaccessible,” Sarah Dadouch and Paulina Villegas wrote. There had once been several border crossings. However, Russia — a key Syrian ally with veto power on the U.N. Security Council — forced all the others to close crossings in 2020, describing the aid as a violation of the sovereignty of the Syrian government. After the earthquake, Syria has called for sanctions to be lifted and nternational aid to be delivered, which it can then redistribute — moves that analysts like Charles Lister, director of the Syria program at the D.C.-based Middle East Institute, have called “opportunistic.” In Turkey, too, there are worries that the government is less focused on a speedy response but more on defending its power. With President Recep Tayyip Erdogan facing an election in May, questions about the loosely regulated and allegedly corrupt construction boom his government has overseen may sting. He has quickly come out on the defensive, accusing government critics of spreading “fake news and distortions” and suggesting the government would go after those who tried to cause “social chaos.” On Wednesday, internet-monitoring group NetBlocks reported that Twitter appeared to have been blocked on several networks across the country and pointed to the government as a likely culprit. It’s a potentially cynical move: Rescue efforts had been documented on social media and some trapped survivors had even taken to tweeting their location — but it was the platform where criticism was rampant.   1,000 Words An Algerian rescue team member communicates with a Turkish team through interpreters as they work to retrieve a body from the rubble in Adiyaman, Turkey. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post) Rescue workers provide first aid to a child they rescued from under the rubble, 50 hours after the earthquake hit. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post) From Adiyaman, Turkey, Kareem Fahim and Zynep Karatas report on the patchwork relief effort that began to gather pace in ravaged southern Turkey: "Algerian rescue workers were this city’s heroes for a few minutes after they freed two children from a collapsed apartment building, on a broad boulevard lined with destruction, long past the time anyone expected good news. But there were no relatives waiting to receive the children: a girl, maybe 7, wearing a white T-shirt, and a younger boy with close-cropped hair. It was possible that family members would find them later, at a hospital, but also that their parents or other relatives were still under the rubble. Instead, it was a stranger — a Turkish charity worker — who sobbed uncontrollably outside the tent where the children were recovering, as if they were his own."   Talking Points • How big was the Turkey-Syria earthquake? Post graphic reporters Szu Yu Chen and Daniel Wolfe show us, visually, just how powerful the quake was. Magnitude is logarithmic, they explain, meaning their differences are exponential. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria released forces roughly 20 times stronger than the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in California in 1989, for example. More than 15,000 have been killed in the earthquake as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to his country’s shattered south on Wednesday. • The Biden administration is negotiating an agreement with Mexico that could allow U.S. authorities to carry out large-scale deportations of non-Mexicans back across the border for the first time, according to four current and former U.S. officials familiar with the discussions. • Dutch prosecutors said it was likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off on a decision to supply long-range antiaircraft missile systems to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine before they shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew. • North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has given the clearest signal yet that he is positioning his middle-school-aged daughter as his successor, analysts say, after a raft of official photos showed the girl holding center stage in a banquet hall full of military top brass. A photograph distributed by the North Korean government of Kim Jong Un, with wife Ri Sol Ju and daughter Kim Ju Ae, at a banquet to mark the 75th founding anniversary of the Korean People’s Army. (KCNA/AP)   Top of The Post Social Security, Medicare brawl awaits Washington, even if not this year By Jeff Stein ●  Read more »   GOP lawmakers allege Big Tech conspiracy, even as ex-Twitter employees rebut them By Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima ●  Read more »   Fact-checking President Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address By Glenn Kessler ●  Read more »     Viewpoints U.S. foreign policy reduced to an afterthought By Marwan Bishara | Al Jazeera ●  Read more »   The world’s biggest democracy is jettisoning freedom and tolerance By Lydia Polgreen | The New York Times ●  Read more »   Why Jan. 6 and its aftermath look far worse than Brazil’s failed coup By Gabriel Pasquini | The Washington Post ●  Read more »     Drought doomed this empire Hattusha, located near modern Bogazkale, Turkey, was the capital of the Hittite Empire during part of the Bronze Age. (Izzet Keribar/Getty Images) No one knows for sure what happened to the ancient Hittite Empire. For nearly 500 years, its dominion extended across much of modern Turkey and into Syria and Lebanon. Its kings dwelled in massive stone palaces inside a gated capital city. Large-scale farming, sophisticated irrigation systems and far-reaching trade networks filled the imperial coffers. And then, just after 1200 B.C., it vanished. Archaeological investigations suggest that the royal administration packed up the palace and fled the capital. The city was abandoned and later burned. Few accounts from the fractured kingdom remain to explain exactly why. But climate data, captured in the rings of long-dead trees, offer a clue. A new analysis published Wednesday in the journal Nature shows that the Hittites endured three consecutive years of extreme drought right around the time that the empire fell. Such severe water shortages may have doomed the massive farms at the heart of the Hittite economy, leading to famine, economic turmoil and ultimately political upheaval, researchers say. “One year of drought is a problem. Two years — it’s a crisis. By three years in a row, perhaps it’s actually more than a crisis,” said Sturt Manning, an archaeologist at Cornell University and lead author of the Nature study. “Seeing that back-to-back-to-back failure — that’s probably what overthrows a major state.” The study is the latest from an accumulating field of research linking the fall of civilizations to abrupt shifts in Earth’s climate. In the ruins of ancient Egypt, Stone Age China, the Roman Empire, Indigenous American cities and countless other locations, experts have uncovered evidence of how floods, droughts and famines can alter the course of human history, pushing societies to die out or transform. As human greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels, warm the atmosphere and alter the lands that modern nations were built on, archaeologists say this research offers both a warning and a reassurance. It underscores the peril of increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters. But it also points to strategies that might make communities more resilient: cultivating diverse economies, minimizing environmental impacts, developing cities in more sustainable ways. To Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, an archaeologist at Temple University who was not involved in the newly published research, the lessons of history are especially relevant after two massive earthquakes ripped through Southern Turkey and Syria this week, killing more than 11,000 people and leaving thousands more stranded in the cold. Though not climate-related, the quakes provide yet another reminder of the Earth’s power to upend societies — and of the need for measures to protect vulnerable people from environmental harms.  “Things like climate change, earthquakes, drought — they are of course realities of our lives,” Durusu-Tanrıöver said. “But there are human actions that can be taken to foresee what will happen and behave accordingly.” – Sarah Kaplan Read more: Drought may have doomed this ancient empire — a warning for today’s climate crisis   Afterword

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