Major quake shakes eastern city of Van, 1.000 feared dead

A 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit eastern Turkey yesterday, triggering the collapse of buildings and killing many people, according to officials and experts. At least 50 people were taken to the single hospital in the city of Van, Anatolia news agency said, and at least 10 buildings in central Van and 25 buildings in the Ercis district, including a dormitory, collapsed. "There is serious human and material loss," said a brief statement from the Prime Ministry’s national disaster body. The Kandilli Observatory placed the death toll estimate at up to 1,000." The intensity of a 7.2 [magnitude earthquake] could be [around] eight or nine. The point of concern for Turkey’s institutions and the public is the scale of the damage," Mustafa Erdik, director of Istanbul’s Kandilli Observatory and Research Institute, told a press conference in Istanbul yesterday. Between 3,000 and 4,000 buildings were estimated to have been heavily damaged in the area, he said, while some 664 buildings were so severely damaged that people were likely to have lost their lives in them.