(Dobbs) Destruction and Death, This One Is Nobody's Fault
In wars and natural disasters alike, people are victims of where they were born.
I’ve covered too many massive life-shattering earthquakes— including one in Turkey itself— to just dismiss as someone else’s tragedy what happened in the early hours of this Monday morning in Turkey and Syria.
I can’t do that when I know what it looks like there. And what it feels like. And sounds like. And smells like.
I can’t when I once saw whole families die together during a colossal earthquake that killed thousands in the Apennine Mountains of Italy, after their homes collapsed on top of them.
I can’t when I once watched weeping survivors of a monstrous earthquake in Yemen, digging in a drenching rainstorm with their bloodied bare hands through the sticks and stones of what once were their homes, hoping to find a loved one still alive but just as often to retrieve a body to bury.
I can’t when I picture one man in a mountaintop village there, cradling the mangled corpse of his baby son, crying toward the skies for a rationale that didn’t come.
As in Italy, whole families have now died together in Turkey and Syria. As in Yemen, survivors with bloodied bare hands are now digging through rubble and finding only death beneath it.
That’s why, from where I sit, I have to pay attention to this newest earthquake’s terrible toll. From the images alone, it looks like war-torn Ukraine. Thousands of human lives have been wiped out in a few tremulous shakes of the earth, and as in every catastrophe of this magnitude, the official death toll is far from complete. Thousands more have been gravely hurt, and according to reports from the ground on CNN, countless more Turks and Syrians are now homeless, reportedly “sleeping in the streets in the freezing cold.” It takes a horrific calamity to make them seem like the lucky ones.
What I put aside at moments like this is who they are. It doesn’t matter that they are on another continent. It doesn’t matter that they are citizens of nations with which we have our differences. In a way, I think of the sorry souls in the earthquake zone the same way I think of the ordinary citizens of Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine. The atrocities their governments commit in their names are not their fault. The Syrians and Turks, like the Russians, are victims of where they were born.
We’ve had our own sad share of earthquakes in this country, none deadlier than the infamous quake of 1906 in San Francisco, my home town. It is the only one in this nation’s history with a death toll in the thousands, rivaling what we are seeing right now in the Middle East. In fact, with estimates at 7.9 on the Richter Scale, San Francisco’s quake was stronger than the 7.8 recorded during the main shock in Turkey. Much of the destruction in 1906 though wasn’t because buildings fell. It was because, as gas lines broke, buildings burned.
The next worst in San Francisco was the one named “Loma Prieta” in 1989— that was the one that famously struck just as a World Series game was getting underway in the city. Throughout the Bay Area, it killed 63 people. One saving grace was a lower level on the Richter Scale— 6.9— but another was the advances in solid and sometimes earthquake-resistant construction in the 20th Century. These are advances that hadn’t reached much of the earthquake zone that took such a pounding today.
As a side note, I’ll always remember the fourth day after that California quake, reporting from Oakland amid the collapsed ruins of an elevated freeway that was flattened, where 42 of the 63 deaths happened.
Rescuers pulled a rugged longshoreman named Buck Helm, who had survived for 90 hours, out of his crushed car, alive. It seemed a miracle and in a way it was, but Helm had to be hospitalized and little more than one month later, he succumbed to respiratory failure and became that 42nd freeway casualty.
But still, Helms’s rescue from the rubble is a common bond between citizens in a modern American city and citizens in primitive places like eastern Turkey and northern Syria. It doesn’t matter where it is or who’s been hurt. People pitch in to help with rescue, recovery, and relief.
And governments too. From the oil-rich Gulf states to Iran to the United States of America, equipment and aid and disaster experts already are on their way.
They’re not writing this off as someone else’s tragedy.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Well stated Greg. Unfortunately, in our present cocoons of security we are becoming all too immune to the tragedies of poor government colliding with natural disasters.
Well done Greg, and important and sobering reminder....Much of global destruction, now and going forward is "Mother Nature." at work. Throughout today, nearly every conversation I had with locals, from shopkeepers to my trainer to friends was about "when do you think we'll get our next big one [that is here, in No. California]. And I wonder whether--frayed relations being what they are---whether Israel offered as they often do and the Syrian gov't (Turkey likely would accept Israel's help these days) rejected that help. The whole thing is so sad. Thank you for writing this.