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mrmckizzle | 3 years ago

20,000 people killed. That's a mind blowing number. Didn't realize it was that high.

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MengerSponge|3 years ago

20,000 reported dead so far. That's far from a complete tally, sadly.

People were asleep in their homes when the first one hit. Many apartment buildings were not built to Turkey's post-1999 earthquake construction standards, so they collapsed. Many of those were built after 1999, but the government let developers cut corners and pay a fee for amnesty.

Like COVID in the US and China, there are a lot of political pressures that will encourage an undercount.

toss1|3 years ago

Indeed! I fear that it will end up an order of magnitude higher. Just looking at the types of buildings collapsed, hearing the next day that they'd already counted 7,000 collapsed buildings, and then "tens of thousands" of collapsed buildings a day later; IDK the current count. Even if we estimate an average of only 10 people per building, which seems low for multistory apartment buildings at a time when almost everyone is home sleeping, the coming numbers are likely to be horrific. Hard to even think about.

layer8|3 years ago

The 1999 İzmit earthquake had 17000 casualties, roughly the same order of magnitude, though not quite as high.