Turkish quake survivors camp out, death toll 279

Tens of thousands of people spent a second night under canvas, in cars or huddled round small fires in towns rattled by aftershocks from a massive earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed hundreds. Early on Tuesday (October 25) the death toll from Sunday s quake stood at 279 and hundreds more were still missing. Quake survivors struggled to free relatives known to be trapped. "It was very cold inside the tents and despite all that, I pulled out one of my brothers and one of my nieces from under rubble," said one man, standing outside rows of tents bearing the Turkish Red Crescent symbol at an encampment in the town of Ercis. Casualties were concentrated, so far, in Ercis and the provincial capital Van, with officials still checking outlying areas. Seven people were rescued overnight, broadcaster CNN Turk reported. As grieving families prepared on Tuesday to bury their dead, others kept vigil by the mounds of concrete rubble and masonry, praying rescue teams would find missing loved ones alive. The Disaster and Emergency Administration said 1,301 people had been injured and 2,262 buildings had collapsed. Rescue teams concentrated efforts in Ercis, a town of 100,000 that was worst hit by the 7.2 magnitude tremor. The Turkish Red Crescent distributed up to 13,000 tents, and was preparing to provide temporary shelter for about 40,000 people, although there were no reliable estimates of the number of people left destitute. The relief agency was criticised for failing to ensure that some of the most needy, particularly in villages, received tents as temperatures plummeted overnight. Other survivors lamented the lack of facilities in the emergency encampments. "We spent the night under freezing temperature. We shivered all night long, nobody provided us any blankets or heaters, we don t even have a toilet. People are getting sick. It is very dirty here," said a women who spent the night in a tent in Ercis. Whatever the shortcomings of the relief operation, the disaster posed little risk to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who secured a third consecutive term with a strong majority at a national election in June. The trauma of the quake is one more problem to bear for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in southeast Turkey, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency. The centre of Van, a city of 1 million people, resembled a ghost town with no lights in the streets or buildings. Hardly any people could be seen. The sense of dislocation was greater in Ercis. With no homes to return to, thousands of people, mostly men, paced the streets, stopping to look at the destruction or whenever there was some commotion at a rescue operation site.