Deadly earthquake

last updated 8 January 2015

Celtiksuyu, Turkey

More than 80 kids were crushed to death in Turkey’s Bingol province last week when their school dormitory collapsed in an earthquake. Rescue workers said the four-story cinder-block building at the state-run school was so flimsy it simply broke apart. The children who survived did so only because they were trapped in air pockets made by steel bed frames. “Without steel bunk beds and lockers, we would not have been able to pull a single living person out of this rubble,” rescue chief Ufuk Solmaz told The Washington Post. Shoddy construction has been blamed for hundreds of earthquake deaths over the past decade in Turkey, where corrupt builders charge for expensive materials but actually use cheap ones. “The builders will be arrested sooner or later,” said Bingol Gov. Huseyin Cos.