GAZIANTEP (Turkiye): Rifat Setinkaya had retired to bed after sipping Turkish tea as usual on a Sunday night, not realising that he would be jolted from his sleep hours later by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Nurdagi.
Luckily, the 63-year-old retired railway worker managed to flee from his house on the first floor of a seven-storey apartment block. However, his two brothers and a sister living in a nearby apartment were not so lucky.
The apartment where Rifat lives managed to withstand the tremor but the apartment building where his brothers and sister live was reduced to rubble.
Bernama spotted the old man when he was sitting in front of a collapsed building, accompanied by a burning fire pit to warm his fragile body.
Seeing the man with his eyes almost closed to avoid the burning feeling caused by the smoke, the writer began asking him questions with the help of local translator Arif Akdag.
At first Rifat hesitated to answer any question, but as Arif slowly persuaded him he began to open up.
“My brothers and sister live here. I want them to be found, dead or alive it doesn’t matter,” he said.
Rifat, a native of Nurdagi, said the Feb 6 earthquake was the strongest in 100 years.
“My grandfather used to tell me stories about strong earthquakes when I was little. It never crossed my mind I will experience it,” he said.
He said he was woken up as the ground shook. Together with his wife and son, he made a dash for safety but his 30-year-old son fell and hurt his right leg.
“After things calmed down, I came here to my brothers’ house about 200 metres away and the building was no longer standing. Dust filled the air like a December snow,” he said.
Rescuers have yet to locate his siblings. So far the Malaysian SAR team has retrieved about 20 bodies from the site, located only two kilometres from the Nurdagi Stadium.
The earthquake has killed more than 40,000 people and injured about 20,000 in southern Turkiye and northwestern Syria.
Turkiye has declared a three-month state of emergency in 10 provinces, namely Adana, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kahramanmaras, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye and Sanliurfa to ensure the SAR mission runs smoothly. – BERNAMA
