Before We Forget Again: What We Learned from the Turkey Earthquake Response

Southeast Turkey and Syria were left devastated after a series of earthquakes hit the region. The first quake, of magnitude 7.8, hit the city of Gaziantep at 4 AM in the morning on February 6th.

What followed was a disaster. At the time of this writing, we have lost more than 40,000 people. Over 80,000 are injured. Many are still under the rubble.

Per estimations, the community directly affected by this disaster is around 13 million people, or 1-2 out of every 10 people in Turkey and Syria. The impacted area amounts to the surface area of Austria, two times that of Denmark, and three that of Belgium.

To navigate these times, I found myself thinking and reading a lot about better ways for collective action for crisis response. In many cases, for various reasons, the largest governing body is not able to coordinate as needed.

Below is a personal account of local crisis response, along with a curation of the wonderful voluntary work that emerged after this earthquake and some more ideas for humanity’s repetitive resilience in the face of disasters.

A personal account of the humanitarian crisis, from afar

Turkey is an earthquake country. The seismic activities stem from the collisions between the Eurasian, African, and Arabian plates.

The latest generation residing in the Marmara region, including myself, vividly remember the 1999 Izmit earthquake that took about 20,000 lives. My grandma had lost her younger sister and mother in the 1939 Erzincan earthquake, surviving for 3-4 days under the debris. Everyone has memories of some earthquake in their family history.

With the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake, many residential buildings, including municipality buildings, airports, and hospitals, were among those demolished. The earthquake happened around 4 AM, and photos with daylight showed buildings still in shambles with no teams or machinery around.

Waking up that morning, everyone I knew, including myself, was  frantically publishing emergency messages, requesting excavators to rescue our friends’ families on social media, hoping that some other contact in the region might see the message and help out. Where was the machinery? Where were the teams? So many national and international medical search and rescue teams were on their way to the region, yet, many couldn’t even enter the cities because of the traffic jam. Some others reported hours of waiting as officials were trying to assign them to a region. Medical teams were extremely short of supplies. Like everything wasn’t enough, there was news of a big fire, too.

Footage of quake survivors in despair, demanding action to save their loved ones roamed the Internet. There was news of people being called to police centers because they were harshly criticizing the government for the lack of timely support. In their defense, some government officials claimed they were spreading disinformation to further elevate the panic environment. Some of the arrest orders were for people who had just lost their families in the quake.

Using the Internet and Social Media as a Resource

People safe from the earthquake were sad, angry, frustrated, and not letting this hinder them in their efforts to pack and ship first-response supplies.

Volunteers started making lists of the construction firms and their owners that marketed their cheap, poorly-engineered buildings as otherwise. Others built websites like afetbilgi.com and deprem.io; set up communities on Discord to discuss what else can be done; put resources together. They touched upon many things from recommendations to spread the word to psychiatrists associations’ guides on keeping calm. For international teams, there are disaster management dictionaries. Larger, more organized volunteer organizations like Ahbap, Akut, Research Institute on Turkey or Turkish Philanthropy Funds did not cease their call for more financial support.

All of a sudden, Twitter got banned. The main tool with which people ask for help and coordinate resources. Luckily, the ban did not last for long after widespread protests. Around this time, people noticed how some correspondents of the major media outlets turned the microphone away and shut down people the moment they started talking about how their families were still under the rubble.

Soon after, came news of violence -  violence toward Syrian immigrants, toward “predators”; photos of people with enormous firearms.

Last but not least, a continuous flow of crippling news, also of living beings trying to save others.

Dissecting the humanitarian crisis: Disinformation, untimeliness and under-preparation

I don’t want this piece to be a political account. I haven’t personally verified all the footage I shared above.

This is problem #1: Misinformation, wrong information; or disinformation, information that is wrong on purpose, roams the Internet every day.

Their tide is higher whenever there’s a crisis. Luckily, there are platforms based out of Turkey, like teyit.org or dogrulukpayi.com, that help with fact-checking. Still, they can’t always impact some real-time spread.

Problem #2 is that the people in need don’t always get the services they deserve when they need them. The service range is wide, from being brought back to life by a strong pull out of the debris, to an emergency amputation, a bowl of hot soup, or a place to stay. The necessary coordination is complex, with many resources that need to be stocked in relevant hubs beforehand and successful ways for efficient dispatching algorithms.

The third problem is that of under-preparation, both individually and collectively on multiple layers of scale. A classic problem of collective action at play with its different flavors. After all, no one can really tell with a few glances whether a building is safe, and any construction company is better off financially when they build 5 houses in parallel instead of properly managing the project of a single one, cutting off from materials.

Challenges ahead

Now, two weeks after the first wave of the quake, it’s a good time to assess the situation and plan ahead.

First and foremost, the quake survivors have lost so much. For their short-term stay, there need to be structures set up before they are dispatched to longer-term stays, which need to be facilitated and eased with adequate law-making. Education and health facilities need to be set up or adapted. As we try to pick up the pieces of what was once our cities, our homes, this elongated phase of recovery also desperately needs civilian support.

This very tragic instance and so many other types of crises are prone to cross our way. Just another example, from the top of my head, are the wildfires that terrify the Mediterranean summer after summer, or the 2021 European floods. We, humans of the world, need ways that help us act faster despite all the bureaucracies, inefficiencies, and stupidities that stand in the way of survival for others.

Last but not least, we need to make sure that we’re individually and collectively ready to act as efficiently as possible in the face of another disaster. Mind you fellow Istanbulites, scientists have been warning us about the upcoming Istanbul earthquake for at least a decade now. Still, many ignore this unpleasant news, ignoring the necessity to start preparing both on an individual and collective level.

We need a stronger civil society worldwide

Individual preparation will get us far, but only to a certain extent. Like many other big endeavors, we need to act with peer community members to make sure our impact is larger. Let’s look at some options on how this larger impact could take shape.

Stay Informed

First and foremost, we need to make sure we’re properly informed of any disasters that are prone to happen, what preventive mechanisms there are, and whether it was properly executed by those in power. Also, we need to be informed of the latest biggest humanitarian crises, like the Syrian Civil War, which has displaced millions of people, or the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Take the time to research all the events, trends, and decision-making that led to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Provide Support Where You Can

Most likely, those crises have affected where you live. If you’re lucky enough not to find yourself amidst an overflowing amount of causes you need to help out with, just start with actors providing support and solidarity to victims of these calamities.

Research shows how civil society has weakened in the last decade, and along with it, democracies worldwide are weakened, too. Civil organizations are generally severely underfunded. Cross-border donations are usually not persistent enough, making it hard to speak of a globally open civic space. Perhaps what It takes is as small a step as dedicating attention to global issues to strengthen civil society worldwide. Listing their advice and solution suggestions to strengthen civil society, a local organization, Civil Pages, proposes the following:

• Internalization of democratic culture [in global civil society].
• Strengthening the institutional structures [of civil organizations] with professional support.
• Utilizing scientific methods of data collection and evaluation, employing qualified human resources.
• Reproduction of financial resources; efficient and transparent use of existing resources.
• Keeping the channels of dialogue open and interacting with the society, the state, the ‘other,’ and other organizations, establishing mutual trust.
• Abandoning identity politics, acting like a political party and vertical hierarchy.
• Establishing an equal-base relationship with the government, avoiding the hegemony of power.
• Protection of independence against political, economic, and cultural power centers.
• Making maximum use of new opportunities brought by technology and digital media.

We can and should demand better from our governments

Managing disasters is perhaps one of the hardest duties of any government. Without meddling in any politics, favoritism, or ideology, we can and should analyze how governments acted post-crisis and demand that we learn from mistakes made. Not only from our own mistakes in one instance, but from others’ mistakes, too.

Thinking of earthquakes, Japan is among the first countries that come to mind. While earthquakes were big disasters that caused thousands of casualties many years ago, now, the country has managed to protect nearly all its habitants with a set of strategies mixing technology, logistics & resource planning, and regulations.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction sets clear priorities and targets for governments, along with recommendations on “building back better.” The framework highlights the need for a careful analysis of any disaster’s local effect and characteristics. It also talks about disaster risk governance at national, regional, and global levels. Reporting on their learnings for a program designed to help developing countries in disaster management, the government of Japan and the World Bank talk about the importance of ensuring the resilience of water, sanitation, and telecommunications systems during disaster times.

Generalized to help governmental city planners of developing areas plan for urban resilience, the UN also has fantastic resources like the City Resilience Action Planning Tool. Last but not least, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency has fantastic resources and programs like the Community Emergency Response Teams, which states,  “a program is a nationally supported, locally implemented initiative that teaches people how to better prepare themselves for hazards that may affect their communities. CERT trains them in basic disaster response skills such as team organization, disaster medical operations, fire safety, and light search and rescue”.

Conclusion

We need to take steps now as a  global community and strive to put all living beings in dignified living conditions. Otherwise, in the busy agenda surrounding our lives, what we experienced in the last weeks is doomed to be forgotten soon. And sooner or later, another disaster will strike us again, leaving us frustrated and angry. We'll ask ourselves, why we didn’t do anything before.

Some first pointers to get involved:

• Turkey Earthquake Donations, full list on Notion
• Open Development Network / Açık Yazılım Ağı (community of tech-savvy builders of solutions for the earthquake, main language is Turkish)
• r/Earthquakes

Don’t forget, your best way to survive is through building a community.

The lead image for this article was generated by HackerNoon's AI Image Generator via the prompt "earthquake aftermath".