Personal News
A 7.8 magnitude earthquake caused the death of at least fifteen people in the Turkish province of Osmaniye, in the south of the country, on Monday (February 6th), authorities said a few minutes after an initial assessment of five victims provided by Erdinç Yilmaz, the governor of the province, quoted by the state agency Anadolu. According to him, thirty-four buildings were destroyed there.
According to the American seismological institute USGS, the earthquake took place at 4:17 a.m. local time (2:17 a.m. Paris time), at a depth of approximately 17.9 kilometers. According to AFAD, the government’s disaster management agency, the earthquake had a magnitude of 7.4. The epicenter is located in the district of Pazarcik, in the province of Kahramanmaras, about 60 km as the crow flies from the Syrian border. The tremors, felt throughout the south-east of the country, were also felt in Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus, according to correspondents from Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Videos posted on social networks show destruction of buildings in several cities in the south-east of the country, such as Adiyaman, Diyarbakir and Malatya, according to the private Turkish channel NTV.
One of the most active seismic zones in the world
Syrian state television reported that a building near Latakia, on Syria’s west coast, collapsed after the quake. Pro-government media said several buildings also partially collapsed in Hama, central Syria. Civil defense and Syrian firefighters are at work to extract possible victims from the rubble.
Turkey is located in one of the most active seismic zones in the world. At the end of November 2022, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake hit the northwest of the country, injuring around fifty people and causing limited damage, according to the emergency services.
This same region of the North-West had been hard hit in August 1999 by an earthquake of magnitude 7.4, which caused the death of 17,000 people, including a thousand in Istanbul. In January 2020, a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck the provinces of Elazig and Malatya (East), killing more than 40 people. In October of the same year, a magnitude 7 earthquake in the Aegean Sea killed 114 people and injured more than 1,000 in Turkey.
