A government official said on Friday that Turkey has started to rebuild homes after this month’s devastating earthquakes. The death toll in Turkey and Syria has now passed 50,000.
During the February 6 earthquakes that killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey and neighboring Syria, more than 160,000 buildings with 520,000 apartments either fell down or were severely damaged.
Friday night, the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said that 44,218 people have died because of earthquakes in Turkey.
With Syria’s new death toll of 5,914, the total number of people who have died in both countries is now over 50,000.
President Tayyip Erdogan has promised to rebuild homes in a year, even though there are elections coming up in a few months. Experts have said that safety should come before speed. Some buildings that were made to stand up to earthquakes fell apart in the recent ones.
“There have been bids and contracts for a number of different projects. The process moves very quickly, “The official said this on the condition of anonymity and added that safety would not be put at risk.
Tents have been sent out to help the many homeless people, but some people have had trouble getting to them.
“There are eight of them. We have a tent as our home. The top of the tent is wet, and the ground is also wet. We’ve asked for more tents, but they haven’t given us any “Melek, 67, was in line outside of a high school in the town of Hassa to get help.
A group of volunteers called Interrail Turkey was using the school as a place to give out aid. Sumeyye Karabocek, a volunteer, said that the lack of tents was still the biggest problem.
There was a need for 500,000 new homes.
Erdogan’s government has taken a lot of heat for how it handled the disaster and for what many Turks say was years of not enforcing quality control in building.
He said that the first plan for the Turkish government is to spend at least $15 billion to build 200,000 apartments and 70,000 village homes. The US bank JPMorgan said it would cost $25 billion to rebuild houses and infrastructure.
The UNDP said that because of the damage, 1.5 million people are now homeless and 500,000 new homes are needed.
It said that it had asked for $113.5 million of the $1 billion that the UN had asked for last week, and that this money would be used to clear away mountains of rubble.
The UNDP says that between 116 million and 210 million tons of rubble were made by the disaster. This is a lot more than the 13 million tons of rubble that were made by the earthquake in northwest Turkey in 1999.
Turkey also made new rules so that companies and charities can build homes and workplaces for people in need and give them to the ministry of urbanization.
Many people who lived through the earthquake in southern Turkey have left the area or moved into tents, container homes, or other places set up by the government.
In Antakya, Saeed Sleiman Ertoglu, who is 56 years old, loaded up what was left of his shop’s stock that wasn’t damaged.
“The glassware was even more beautiful than usual, but then we had this (earthquake), and it was all broken,” he said, after his home and shop had survived the first earthquake but not the second. He thought that only 5% of his goods had made it.
“What can we do?,” he said. “This is something God did, and God’s will always brings good things.”
