Three violent earthquakes shook western Turkey on Monday, cracking walls, collapsing chimneys and sending 30 people to hospital, including a man who reportedly threw himself from the fifth floor of a building in panic.
Fear gripped many people who refused to enter buildings, preferring to wait in parks in case of aftershocks, witnesses said.
Anatolia news agency said about 30 people were hospitalised, mostly for treatment of fractures, after they jumped off balconies or windows. One man who had hurled himself off the fifth floor of a building was in a critical condition, it said.
The first quake occurred beneath the Aegean Sea at 8.45am local time.
Measured at 5,7 points on the Richter scale by the Kandilli observatory and six by the Athens observatory, it was felt in several Turkish towns on the Aegean coast and on the nearby Greek islands of Chios and Samos.
A second earthquake, measuring 5,9, struck at 12.47pm with its epicentre beneath the Aegean Sea off the town of Seferihisar, which lies 40km south-west of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city, a spokesperson for Kandilli observatory said.
A third temblor, with an intensity of 5,6 on the Richter scale, followed eight minutes later, the Kandilli observatory said.
Officials said the quakes did not cause extensive structural damage.
But schools were closed for the rest of the day and Tuesday in Izmir and the surrounding Izmir province.
In the coastal resort of Urla, several house chimneys collapsed and cracks opened up in the walls of buildings after the first tremblor, said the town mayor Selcuk Karaosmanoglu.
”The second quake was extremely strong. It shook the area quite violently,” said an accountant from Izmir, Umut Taskin.
Turkey’s top seismologist warned of the threat of more earthquakes in a region, which is crossed by several seismological fault lines.
”These earthquakes can continue over a few days,” Gulay Barbarosoglu, the head of the Kandilli observatory, told the NTV news channel.
About 20 000 people died in two massive tremors in the country’s heavily industrialised north-west in August and November 1999. — Sapa-AFP