The New York Times | 02/21/2023
ISTANBUL — We were late to the scene of the crime.
Two days late. When the first earthquakes hit southern Turkey on Feb. 6, it took one full day of planning and one full day of travel before we reached the epicenter, Gaziantep. The flight from Istanbul usually takes about 90 minutes, but there was a rush of people heading south to help, and our group — about 160 search and rescue volunteers — had to wait our turn.
When we finally reached Islahiye, a town in Gaziantep Province, a man with dust-encrusted hair asked the gendarme why, four days after the earthquake that had caused the Sehit Zafer Yilmaz apartment building to collapse on his family and 19 others, we were finally listening for sounds of life in the rubble. He had told the same gendarme that he heard sounds on the first day and the second and the third but had been told there was nothing there. “There are 6,000 other districts like yours,” the gendarme said. There were many other districts, and many other buildings. In Islahiye alone there were at least 140 other buildings like the Sehit Zafer Yilmaz apartments; in the week that we were there we were assigned eight of them.
During the pandemic, I joined an organization that trains volunteers for neighborhood search and rescue teams so that each neighborhood has people who know what to do in the first crucial hours. An organization born out of the shared belief that when the next earthquake struck, we’d have only one another to rely on, and here we were.
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 