(Dobbs) Surviving With Only The Clothes On Their Backs
The earthquake last month was only the beginning of the victims' nightmare.
I have to admit, I haven’t thought much in the past few days about that dreadful earthquake exactly a month ago today in Turkey and Syria. I haven’t thought much about the dead, I haven’t thought much about the survivors. My life has moved on.
But theirs hasn’t.
That’s why I’m glad that out of the blue last night, their lives came into full focus as I crawled into bed, positioned my pillow just where I like it, pulled the duvet tight over my shoulders, closed my eyes, and laid there suddenly thinking, they can’t do that. An astounding 1.7-million people, almost half of them still surviving in tents and many more crowded into repurposed shipping containers or even under tarpaulins out on the open street, can’t do that. They couldn’t do it last night, they can’t do it tonight, they won’t do it tomorrow night or for endless nights to come.
Their ordeal has hardly even started.
Those who are suffering in Turkey and Syria— whether they are rich or poor, conservative or liberal, old or young— are suffering the same sad way. Through no fault of their own, they ended up with only the clothes on their backs, huddled under blankets and rugs, sometimes with some stranger’s cot almost touching theirs. And all in the freezing cold. It isn’t because they backed the wrong side in a war, or voted for the wrong candidate in an election. They ended up this way because, as I’ve seen in other monstrous tremors, no matter who they are or how they’ve lived their lives, earthquakes don’t discriminate.
Their old world fell down all around them. In their new world there is a shortage of safe water and a scarcity of toilets, leaving them living in a petri dish for disease. Meantime, if their homes didn’t collapse, the earthquake rendered them too unstable to return to. Too dangerous to return to. More than a hundred thousand buildings are like that.
The New York Times ran a sorrowful story about a Turkish family of 14 who spent two weeks under a tarp outside their earthquake-damaged home. Then two engineers from the government’s Ministry of Urbanization came for just a couple of minutes, assessed the home, and told them they could move back in. But shortly after that, “the earth began shaking again.” The matriarch of the family told The Times, she heard a familiar rumble from the mountains and the walls began to shudder. “My legs went numb” she said, then she fainted “as the house crumbled at her feet.”
Here’s The Times’s photo, taken by Turkish photojournalist Emin Ozmen, of what’s left.
All that these people have left now is misery and grief. From my own experience, it is inevitable that with the death toll so high— now at 46,000 in Turkey, nearly 7,000 in Syria— almost all who survived lost a family member or a friend. Or on top of that, maybe their doctor died, maybe their grocer died, maybe their teacher died.
With searchers still combing the rubble before demolishing what’s left, those death tolls are likely to climb even higher.
What they haven’t found after the first two weeks are any more survivors. There were unimaginable stories of people pulled alive from the ruins— one couple and their 12-year-old son were rescued more than twelve days after being buried, although the son later died— but not long after that, Turkey’s Disaster Relief Agency announced that it was shifting its efforts from rescue to recovery.
Think about what you were doing during those twelve days— living, laughing, working, relaxing, eating, drinking, sleeping. In all that time, earthquake victims were still alive under the rubble. With no water, no food, no daylight, no hope. For every person pulled from the wreckage, others were buried in spaces even deeper and darker, also still breathing but their lives slowly and painfully seeping away from them.
Recently I heard an interview on NPR with an earthquake specialist in Southern California. What he said was, the earthquake in Turkey and Syria couldn’t have happened in a worse place— a densely populated region riddled with buildings “susceptible” to collapse and along one of world’s most unstable earthquake faults. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. If it had struck a couple of hours later, a lot of people would have been away from their homes and out on the streets. But it was 4:30 in the morning. Virtually everyone was still home in bed.
When an earthquake hits, we don’t get to pick the timing. It was the perfect storm.
Now that I’m more mindful again of the misery and grief overseas after the earth shook, I can’t shake from my head the tragedy in June, 2021, when the Surfside condo complex near Miami Beach collapsed.
As The Miami Herald reported, “There was no earthquake, gas explosion or terrorist attack to blame.” It was just careless construction, poor design, and a failure to address them “that lined up like dominoes to create the perfect conditions for a deadly chain reaction,” killing 98 people just before midnight.
They were victims of another perfect storm.
We paid attention to that calamity for weeks, as well we should. But multiply that Florida death toll by well over 500 in Turkey and Syria. Multiply the loss of that building in Florida by more than a hundred thousand in Turkey and Syria. Add in half of those 1.7-million survivors still living rough because they have no alternative. Many in one moment had everything they wanted from life. Then the earth trembled. The next moment, they had nothing.
A month afterward, that’s still what they have looking forward: nothing. For what it’s worth, we with so much should not forget about them.
In case you are so inclined, my wife and I looked at several non-profits providing aid and comfort to earthquake victims, and settled on two to which we previously have contributed for their work in Ukraine. They are:
International Rescue Committee and Doctors without Borders
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.
(Dobbs) Surviving With Only The Clothes On Their Backs
Thank you!
Thank you, Greg, for another excellent and moving reminder.