Better soon İzmir..I think there is no danger nowadays for Turkey but 29th March 2006 can be dangerous us..

How do you know so far in advance what day is a dangerous one?

I left Izmir just 2 days before the earthquake, my friends were still there. I was very afraid for them. they said it seemed very big and everyone left their beds and ran out into the streets because its 'safer' than being inside, but the apartments in Izmir are so close together that if you were in the street and the apartments collapsed you would still be crushed.

I remember so well the earthquakes before near Istanbul, even on English TV it was on all the time, I knew a family who all died, they had lived in england for years and just decided to return home when they were killed. It was very terrible. What do you know about March 2006 freshman?

i feel so sorry for them.

what about march 29th freshman abi.

Most probably Lunare eclipse will happen(if some planets and moon come same orbit we can wait eartguake))and we cant pretend anything..

Hi! My boyfriend lives in Izmir, he told me the city shakes as a bellydancer.. well i can tell ye somethin, i dont like bellydancers anywhere near my man!!
It really freaks me out. I live in Holland , so I'm used to a calm environment, boring actually.. but the images of Pakistani earthquake are burnt in my mind.. I'm glad Kadir told me he will leave the city and go to the summerhouse in Didim or to his parents in Ankara.

Has anyone got an idea when the earthquakes might stop? Or is that smt unpredictable?!

The earthquakes will never stop. There is a crack running the whole length of turkey called the Anatolian Fault. It is basically a big crack in the earth and from time to time due to various influences they move. This causes the big earthquakes, like the ones near Istanbul about 10 years ago in which over 17,000 people were killed when the apartment blocks all collapsed.

The problem was the Turkish building standards were poor and the builders did not always stick to the ones that were in place. This meant when the earthquake struck, all the apartment blocks, like the ones you can see all around Izmir just collapsed. It was estimated that the death toll would have been a fraction of the numbers if the apartments were built to better standards, because they would not have collapsed. There are lots of countries that have a lot of earthquakes. Japan for example, but they have very strict building regulations and the buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes.

Problem is, in a country like Turkey which is so poor, the need for cheap and accessible housing overrides the the extra cost of making the buildings safe. I think since the big earthquake new standards are in place, but there are still lots of buildings all over turkey which were built to the old standards (or less) and are a danger to the people who live in them.

Also a lot of apartment blocks, like in Izmir are built into the sides of the mountains (this is true everywhere along the coast, but also all over Turkey which is much more mountainous than many people realise), basically they just chop a big chunk out of the side of the mountain and put an apartment block on it. When there are earthquakes, the sides of the mountains are weakened by the excavations needed to build the apartments, and so the sides of the mountains also collapse away from under the building which causes another problem.

Scary stuff heh?

IZMIR - Turkish Daily News


Early yesterday morning a 5.9-magnitude earthquake became the fourth powerful temblor in five days to shake the western Turkish city of Izmir, sparking panic throughout the city where 37 people were hospitalized for broken bones or concussion as a result of jumping to apparent safety from balconies and out of windows. Two elderly people were reported to have died from heart attacks during the tremor, the Anatolia news agency reported. Many residents in Turkey's third largest city had spent nights sleeping outside their damaged, unsafe properties during in week that was beset by hundreds of aftershocks before this the latest earthquake occurred panicking the already terrified residents of the coastal Aegean city

In a bid to calm the ensuing panic, İzmir Governor's Office denied escalating rumors that the city was soon to be hit by a major, much greater earthquake.

Despite frequent announcements that a major earthquake was not imminent, many buildings were nevertheless evacuated as a precaution

Call for vigilance:

Turkey's top seismologist warned residents to be vigilant and stay away from damaged or derelict buildings as the region, which is crossed by several fault lines, was likely to be shaken by more earthquakes.

"There is intense seismic activity in the region. We expect this activity to continue for some time but we cannot say until when," Gulay Barbarosoglu, the head of the Kandilli observatory told journalists in Istanbul.

"The people of Izmir need to be vigilant and careful, but there is no need to panic," she added.

Izmir Municipality has prepared a project called Risk Assessment Tools for Diagnosis of Urban Areas Against Seismic Disaster (RADIUS) to predict scenarios based on the Izmir fault-line.

According to the project, Izmir is located on active fault-lines and the districts of Balcova, Inciralti, Bostanli and Karsiyaka were determined to be the regions most at risk in terms of possible earthquakes. The RADIUS project has provided the necessary information in the event of a possible earthquake and destruction scenarios. According to RADIUS, the fault lines named "Graben" in the Gediz, Kucuk Menderes, Buyuk Menderes districts in the Aegean Region are located in the First Degree Earthquake Danger Region.

Pff.. yeah really scary.. and i am planning to move to Izmir next year

So the earthquakes might go on for weeks and weeks?