Turkey turns to tents and tourist resorts to house quake’s homeless as death toll passes 19,000
- Mediterranean and Aegean beach resorts outside the quake zone that use the winter months to prepare for summer tourism are opening up hotel rooms for evacuees
- Death toll surpasses the more than 17,000 people killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful quake hit Turkey’s more densely populated northwest
Turkey is grappling with one of the biggest challenges from the earthquake that flattened a swathe of its towns and cities: how to shelter hundreds of thousands of people left homeless in the middle of winter.
The dilemma comes as the death toll from quakes which struck both Turkey and Syria early on Monday morning passed 19,000 on Thursday.
That surpasses the more than 17,000 people killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful quake hit Turkey’s more densely populated northwest.
In Turkey, banks of tents are being erected in stadiums and shattered city centres, and Mediterranean and Aegean beach resorts outside the quake zone that use the winter months to prepare for summer tourism are opening up hotel rooms for evacuees.
But with some 6,500 buildings collapsed and countless more buildings damaged, hundreds of thousands of people lack safe housing.
Syrian refugee Bahjat Selo, 62, and his family have camped near their breeze block and corrugated metal home in Kahramanmaras since the quake caused dangerous cracks in its walls.
“It’s too dangerous to be inside. When we go in to get things, we go in like thieves.” he said.