Another earthquake hits Turkey-Syria border

There were new reports of collapsed buildings in Syria after another powerful earthquake struck Turkey’s Hatay province, which was devastated by a massive tremor two week ago.

Turkey’s disaster management agency, AFAD, said the magnitude 6.4 earthquake was centered around the town of Defne, in Hatay province. It was followed by a second, magnitude 5.8 tremor.

NTV television said the quake caused some damaged buildings to collapse, but there were no immediate reports of any casualties. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency said the quake was felt in Syria, Jordan, Israel and Egypt.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Feb. 6 has killed nearly 45,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Turkish authorities have recorded more than 6,000 aftershocks since.

Some media outlets in Syria’s Idlib and Aleppo regions that were badly affected by the new, 6.4 magnitude earthquake are reporting that some buildings have collapsed and that electricity and internet services have been interrupted in parts of the region.

The media outlets said many people fled their homes and were gathering in open areas.

Meanwhile, the Syrian opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense, also known as White Helmets, issued an alert urging residents in the country’s rebel-held northwest to follow guidelines released earlier regarding earthquakes and how to evacuate buildings.

AFAD has raised the number of confirmed fatalities in Turkey from the earlier earthquake to 41,156. That increases the overall death toll in both Turkey and Syria to 44,844.

Search and rescue operations for survivors have been called off in most of the quake zone, but AFAD chief Yunus Sezer told reporters that search teams were pressing ahead with their efforts in more than a dozen collapsed buildings — most of them in the hardest-hit province of Hatay.

There were no signs of anyone being alive under the rubble since three members of one family — a mother, father and 12-year-old boy — were extracted from a collapsed building in Hatay on Saturday. The boy later died.

The European Union’s health agency has warned of the risk of disease outbreaks in the coming weeks.

The Centre for Disease Prevention and Controls said that “food- and water-borne diseases, respiratory infections and vaccine-preventable infections are a risk in the upcoming period, with the potential to cause outbreaks, particularly as survivors are moving to temporary shelters.”

“A surge of cholera cases in the affected areas is a significant possibility in the coming weeks,” it said, noting that authorities in northwestern Syria had already reported thousands of cases of the disease since September and a planned vaccination campaign was delayed due to the quake.

The ECDC also warned of viral infections such as hepatitis A, parasites and bacterial infections that can all be spread by difficult hygiene conditions in emergency shelters and camps.

Syria’s minister of public works and housing, Suhail Abdul Latif, said the Syrian government would secure 350 housing units for people displaced by the earthquake and made a call for “friendly countries” to send more.

“We will secure the affected people within our capabilities, but after a while, it is not possible to continue placing families in shelters in order to preserve their health,” he said.

Housing has been a pressing need in all the earthquake-stricken areas, with many families sleeping in makeshift tents or cramming into crowded schools and sports stadiums.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who faces elections in May or June, says his country will start building tens of thousands of new homes as early as next month.

Erdogan said the new buildings will be no taller than three or four stories, built on firmer ground and to higher standards and in consultation with “geophysics, geotechnical, geology and seismology professors” and other experts.

“We want to avoid disasters … by shifting our settlements away from the lowlands to the [more solid] mountains as much as possible,” Erdogan said in a televised address during a visit to hard-hit Hatay province.

The Turkish leader said destroyed cultural monuments would be rebuilt in accordance with their to “historic and cultural texture.”

Erdogan said around 1.6 million people were being housed in temporary shelters.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has praised the support provided by Americans following the earthquake.

Blinken said in Ankara that the U.S. government had responded “within hours” to the disaster and had so far sent hundreds of personnel and relief supplies. But he said that ordinary Americans had also responded to “heartbreaking” images from the quake zone.

“We have nearly $80 million in donations from the private sector in the United States, [from] individuals. When I visited the Turkish Embassy in Washington, I almost couldn’t get in the front door because boxes were piled high throughout the driveway to the embassy,” Blinken said.

NATO says a ship carrying 600 temporary container homes has left Italy and is expected to arrive in Turkey next week.

The military alliance has pledged to send more than 1,000 containers that will serve as temporary shelters for at least 4,000 people left homeless by the earthquake.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, who visited the quake-devastated region last week, called it the worst disaster in the alliance’s history.