Tue 07 March 2023:
The cost of damage caused by devastating earthquakes in Turkey will exceed $100 billion, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) official says ahead of a major donor conference next week.
“It’s clear from the calculations being done to date that the damage figure presented by the government and supported by … international partners would be in excess of $100bn,” the UNDP’s Louisa Vinton said at a news briefing on Tuesday by video link from Gaziantep, a Turkish city that suffered severe damage in the quakes.
The earthquakes on February 6 killed more than 52,000 people in southern Turkey and northwest Syria. Many people were buried or crushed while they slept.
A residential building that was damaged during the February 6 earthquake in Turkey’s Diyarbakir collapsed during a controlled demolition.#Turkey #Syria_earthquake pic.twitter.com/o9LjgW1wEc
— INDEPENDENT PRESS (@IpIndependent) March 6, 2023
The provisional damage estimate is being used as the foundation for a donor conference on March 16 in Brussels to raise money for survivors and reconstruction, which Vinton claimed only relates to Turkey.
The World Bank had previously estimated the direct damage in Turkey to be $34.2 billion, but it now predicts much higher costs for recovery and reconstruction as well as losses to Turkey’s gross domestic product due to the quakes’ effects on the country’s economy.
Vinton said the Turkish government with support from the UNDP, the World Bank and the European Union had calculated far higher damage.
Recovery costs, including building improved and more environmentally sustainable infrastructure, “will obviously exceed that amount”, she said.
Vinton described the scenes in Turkey’s worst-hit Hatay province as “apocalyptic”, saying hundreds of thousands of homes have been destroyed. “The needs are vast but the resources are scarce,” she said.
According to Turkish government statistics, about two million survivors have been relocated to temporary housing or have been evacuated from the earthquake-devastated region.
A total of 46,000 people have been relocated to container homes, and approximately 1.5 million people are living in tents. The government claims that others are residing in guesthouses and dormitories.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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