saved: Women pulled from ruins of collapsed building as disaster brings panic

The 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the eastern town of Ercis yesterday, collapsing about 45 buildings, according to deputy prime minister Besir Atalay.

Tens of thousands of residents fled into the streets, while desperate survivors dug into the rubble with their bare hands, trying to rescue the trapped and the injured as the scale of the quake became clear.

Turkey’s state-run television station TRT said a group of inmates escaped from a prison after the earthquake struck. It gave no other detail and it was not immediately known how many had fled.

TRT had earlier reported that 59 people were killed and 150 injured in the eastern town of Ercis. Around 25 others were killed in Van, while a child died in the nearby province of Bitlis.

Turkish scientists estimated that up to 1,000 people could already be dead, basing the calculation on low local housing standards and the size of the quake.

The hardest-hit location was Ercis, a city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border, which lies on the Ercis Fault in one of Turkey’s most earthquake-prone zones. Van, about 55 miles to the south, also sustained substantial damage.

Up to 80 buildings collapsed in Ercis, including a dormitory, and 10 buildings collapsed in Van, the Turkish Red Crescent said. Some motorways also caved in, CNN-Turk television reported.

Hundreds of injured people were treated at the state hospital in Ercis, NTV television said. Survivors in Ercis complained of a lack of heavy machinery to remove chunks of cement floors that pancaked onto each other.

Ercis Mayor Zulfikar Arapoglu said: “There are so many dead. Several buildings have collapsed.

“There is too much destruction.”