One month after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, the death toll is still rising, mounds of rubble scar towns and cities, and rebuilding remains a distant promise.
It had been a snowy first week of February, an unforgiving wind whipping around the hills where Syria and Turkey meet.
“Nothing to worry about,” Nemmeh concluded as he headed home to eat dinner with his family and put the kids to bed. Washington Post journalists also scoured social media to find eyewitness videos that captured the chaos of those first terrifying hours.Since 1900, in this region, one of the planet’s most active earthquake zones, there had been 21 earthquakes of 7.0 magnitude or higher. After this one hit — 7.8 on the scale, the strongest here since 1939 — nothing would be the same. More than 50,000 people were killed; countless buildings collapsed.
Fifty-five miles away, in Antakya in southern Turkey, Orhan, who declined to give his last name, was sleeping in bed with his wife when he felt it. He knew what it was. “I pushed my wife to the corner” of the bed, he said. “I told her to get out first so at least one of us survives.” Finally, on the fourth day, he said, foreign rescue workers arrived. It was too late for Ulucay’s family: “My wife, mother, son were under the rubble. We could not intervene. My wife died screaming, she died screaming. In her hands were full clumps of hair that she pulled out.”In the same city, a few miles north of the Euphrates River, it took five to 10 seconds for Ali Yolli’s seven-story building to begin buckling.
Qassam, the 44-year-old team leader for the White Helmets, awoke to find that “everything was moving.” His mother; his wife, Amna; and their three children — Kinana, 5, Mohamed, 11, and Mahmoud, 14 — woke too, and quickly began to cry as everyone heard screams from other apartments in the building. Neighborhoods fell into blackness as streetlights flared, then toppled. It was still dark out and now it was dark inside too.In Malatya, Turkey, as people ran out of their homes into the presumed safety of streets covered only by open sky, a man knelt in the middle of the snow-powdered road, then tipped onto all fours, pressing his hands against the pavement for stability.
“People looked crazy with fear,” the nurse said. “It wasn’t even time for the fajr,” the dawn prayer, “but the streets were full with people running and yet not knowing where to go. Some people were running toward the mosque, some people were running in the other direction.” In Antakya, Orhan, the man who had pushed his wife out of bed so she might survive, watched as she made it out. He was stuck: “The ceiling had fallen on my head.” He prayed to God to die or emerge alive. He studied what was left of the room around him, planning escape routes, deciding he would try the window if he got a chance. He ended up enduring under the weight of the ceiling for 22 hours.
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