Turkey's Interior Minister Reports Number of Damaged or Destroyed Housing Due to Earthquakes

Approximately 600,000 housing units have been destroyed, severely damaged, or deemed liable for demolition due to earthquakes in Turkey. This was announced on Wednesday by the country’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu during a broadcast on the TRT television channel. “The assessment of damage from the Kahramanmaras earthquakes is 75-80% complete; according to the data received, 600,000 individual structures have been destroyed and need to be urgently demolished. If we add to this the retail spaces, we get a total of 750,000,” stated the minister.

Soylu noted that the Hatay province was impacted much more severely than Kahramanmaras, where the epicenter of the earthquakes was located. Tent cities for 313,000 tents have already been established in all affected provinces. In the near future, he stated, camps for a total of 100,000 containers will be completed, which are expected to provide accommodation for residents, including necessary medical and social services.

Regarding the criticism of authorities for not responding quickly enough to the disaster, Soylu emphasized that the country's leadership and all departments acted as quickly as possible, considering the real capabilities of material and technical support. “Within 8-10 hours, all services were on site. After the first earthquake occurred, and we understood the scale, we needed to simultaneously assess the rubble at 26,000 collapse sites,” he said.

On February 6, two earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.7 and 7.6 struck the Kahramanmaras province in southeastern Turkey with a nine-hour interval. The aftershocks, which were followed by hundreds of tremors, were also felt in neighboring countries, with Syria suffering the most damage. On Monday, two new tremors with magnitudes of 6.4 and 5.8 occurred in Hatay province.

The death toll from the earthquakes in Turkey has exceeded 43,500.