INTRODUCTION

Nature’s Fury Devastates Lives of Thousands:

A 7.8 Richter Scale Magnitude Earthquake jolted Central and Southern Turkey and Western Syria on 6th February’23 in the local early hours laying a trail of catastrophe to be hit again by an unusual and powerful main shock of 7.5 Magnitude. A unanimous take on this is still awaited in the global platform to understand the second ones nature – was it an aftershock or was it another major earthquake triggered by the first one. The first quake occurred 11 miles below the surface, 34 km West of Gaziantep city, Turkey causing structural damage as far away as Israel and Cyprus. The second temblor occurred 60 miles North, 9 hours after the first one.

Leaving destruction, death and despair – the Turkiye-Syria Earthquake – has been one of the deadliest and strongest earthquakes to hit Turkey in modern times. The relative motions of three major tectonic plates (Arabian, Eurasian, and African) and one smaller tectonic block (Anatolian) are responsible for the seismicity in Turkey.

As per reports, there were atleast 48,448 deaths and 115,000 injured across the 11 provinces of Turkey and an approximate 13.5 million people and 4 million buildings affected. The disaster led to the damage of around 345,000 apartments with many up for demolishing owing to the risk factors. By 23 Feb. ‘23, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change conducted damage inspections for 1.25 million buildings; revealing 164,000 buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged. A further 150,000 commercial infrastructure were at least moderately damaged. The International Organization for Migration estimated about 2.7 million people were made homeless.

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