A strong earthquake struck the Aegean Sea on Friday and inflicted damage in both Greece and Turkey, where buildings collapsed killing at least four people with many others trapped in the rubble.
Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said at least 120 were people injured the coastal province of Izmir.
People flooded into the streets in the Turkish city of Izmir after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit, witnesses said. The wreckage of multiple-story buildings in the city’s centre could be seen with people climbing out to escape. Smoke rose into the sky in several areas.
Images on social media showed water rushing through the streets of Izmir from an apparent sea surge.
Another tsunami footage from the earthquake in Izmir province of Turkey.
This one is really dangerous pic.twitter.com/62zfddWSi8
— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) October 30, 2020
Izmir Mayor Tunc Soyer told CNN Turk about 20 buildings collapsed. The city is the third biggest in Turkey with about 4,5 million residents. Turkey’s interior minister tweeted six buildings in Izmir were destroyed.
Environment Minister Murat Kurum said he knew of five collapsed buildings. “Some of our fellow citizens are stuck in the rubble,” he said.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) put the magnitude of the earthquake at 6.6, while the US Geological Survey said it was 7.0. It struck at around 11:50 GMT and was felt along Turkey’s Aegean coast and the northwestern Marmara region.
The epicentre was some 17km (11 miles) off the coast of the Izmir province, at a depth of 16km, AFAD said. The US Geological Survey said the depth was 10km and the epicentre was 33.5 km off Turkey’s coast.
Ali Yerlikaya, governor of Istanbul where the quake was also felt, said there were no reports of damage.
Turkey’s Izmir province sits on an active fault line. The major North Anatolian fault line generated a deadly earthquake quake near Istanbul in 1999, killing more than 17,000 people in the region.
“Greek Foreign Minister [Nikos] Dendias called our minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to wish him the best. Both ministers stressed they were ready to help each other in case of need,” the Turkish foreign ministry said.
Greece rocked
The quake was also felt across the eastern Greek islands and even in the Greek capital, Athens.
“We have had many earthquakes in the past, however, I have never felt one that has lasted this long,” Anna Makris, a school counseling coordinator in Athens, told Al Jazeera.
“There is a real sense of panic and now we are worried about aftershocks,” Makris added.
Greek media said residents of Samos and other islands fled their homes, while some rockfalls were reported.
Residents of Samos, an island with a population of about 45,000, were urged to stay away from coastal areas, Eftyhmios Lekkas, head of Greece’s organisation for anti-seismic planning, told Greece’s Skai TV.
“It was a very big earthquake, it’s difficult to have a bigger one,” said Lekkas.
Public television ERT reported the temblor caused a mini-tsunami on Samos and a number of buildings were damaged. It caused the walls of several homes to collapse and triggered flooding in the port.
A resident of the Greek island Ikaria, right next to Samos, told Al Jazeera she ran out of her house after “the earth started moving”.
“Some people screamed and started crying while others were trying to gather everyone to a safe location in fear that buildings would collapse,” she said, asking not to be named. “There are quite a few damaged buildings and there were landslides on different parts of the island.”
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