After the cabinet meeting, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made his statements. President Erdoğan said: "We will provide 100,000 lira to the relatives of earthquake victims for their immediate needs."
Erdoğan addressed the public following the cabinet meeting held at the central building of the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD). He stated that the two recent earthquakes that shook Turkey on February 6 with unprecedented intensity and magnitude marked the second-largest disaster in Turkey's history, following the Erzincan earthquake in 1939.
Recalling that a 7.7 magnitude earthquake occurred in the Pazarcik region of Kahramanmaraş, and a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the Elbistan region on the same day, Erdoğan noted that the number of aftershocks has reached 3,170 and approximately 13.5 million citizens live in the earthquake-affected cities.
President Erdoğan declared that these earthquakes have also caused minor damages in some neighboring cities.
He mentioned that the destructive effect of the earthquake spans an area of approximately 500 kilometers and that the impact of this earthquake has extended over an area of more than 1,000 kilometers. He further explained that this disaster occurred in a region beyond the territorial integrity of many countries around the world and struck just 7 kilometers below the surface compared to other significant earthquakes in history, amplifying the destruction exponentially.
These successive earthquakes released energy equivalent to hundreds of powerful atomic bombs. While most major earthquakes worldwide occur in the oceans and impact the land, the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes occurred directly beneath residential areas. Erdoğan also recalled that some buildings damaged in the first earthquake were completely destroyed in the second one, stating that the demolition of 15,000 out of 19,000 destroyed buildings has been completed. So far, 369,000 buildings in the earthquake-stricken areas have been assessed by teams from the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization, and Climate Change.
