More than 4,000 people have died after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria. Why was it so deadly?
It was followed by a series of aftershocks, including one that registered 7.5 magnitude.
"It's a very, very well known, very high-hazard, very high seismic risk area," Mark Quigley, associate professor of earthquake science at the University of Melbourne, told SBS News. Associate Professor Quigley said the initial quake had over 20 per cent of the ground acceleration of gravity, exposing hundreds of thousands of people to "very strong shaking".
"Basically, the floors of the building have not been able to withstand what we call the 'shear loading' - the shaking of the ground back and forth, and they've basically pancaked and killed lots of people that were in those buildings at the time," he said. A 17-year-old girl being rescued from under the rubble of a collapsed building in Elbistan district in southern Turkey's Kahramanmaraş Province.Associate Professor Ifte Ahmed, a disaster resilience expert from the University of Newcastle, said if most of the buildings in the region had met the design code of earthquakes there would have been significantly fewer deaths and injuries.
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