7.2 quake causes damage, casualties in Tur

ANKARA, Tur (AP) — A powerful rthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.2 struck stern Tur Sunday, collapsing some buildings and causing a of dths, officials said. At lst 50 people were injured.
The temblor struck stern Van province at 1:41 p.m. (1041 GMT; 6:41 a.m. EDT), the U.S. Geological said. It caused widesprd panic throughout the province as well as neighboring cities.People try to save people trapped under debris in Tabanli
village nr the city of Van after a powerful rthquake
struck stern Tur Sunday Oct. 23, 2011, collapsing some
buildings and causing a of dths, an official said.
( AP Photo/ Abdurrahman Antakyali, Aatolia) TUR OUT"The quake was strongly felt in Van and neighboring towns, and caused damage and dths based on initial assessments," the prime minister's said.
The rthquake toppled some buildings in downtown Van as well as the neighboring town of Ercis, officials said. Several strong aftershocks also were reported.
"There are so many dd. Several buildings have collapsed. There is too much destruction," Zulfikar Arapoglu, the mayor of Ercis, told N television. "We need urt aid. We need medics."
N also said Van's airport was damaged and planes were being diverted to neighboring cities.
Terrified residents spilled into the streets in panic as rescue workers and residents using their bare hands and shovels struggled to evacuate people believed to be trapped under collapsed buildings, television footage showed.
In Van, at lst two buildings collapsed, Bekir Kaya, the mayor of Van town, told N. One of them was a seven-story building, according to Tur's state-run Anatolia news acy.
At lst 50 people were trted for injuries in the courtyard of the state hospital in Van, said the state-run Anatolia news acy.
"The telephone system is jammed due to panic, and we can't assess the entire damage immediately," Kaya said.
Several Cabinet ministers hded to the ar as authorities mobilized rescue tms across the country.
The USGS originally gave the magnitude as 7.3 but later corrected it to 7.2. It said the quake had a depth of 20 kilometers (12.4 miles), which is relatively shallow and could potentially cause more damage.
Tur's Kandilli observatory gave the quake a preliminary magnitude of 6.6, but put its depth at 5 kilometers (3 miles). Several aftershocks as strong as magnitude 5.5 followed, the observatory said.The quake's epicenter was in the village of Tabanli in stern Van province, bordering Iran. But it was felt in several provinces across the ar.
rthquakes are frequent in Tur, which is crossed by fault lines.
In 1999, about 18,000 people were killed by two powerful rthquakes that struck northwestern Tur. Authorities had blamed shoddy construction for many of the dths.
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