Word: muratbagi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...saved. As heavy sleet, then snow began to fall, Kamkas, sat through the night beside the rubble that had been his home. "All day long, we tried to find our families," he later recalled. "And all night long, we stayed with our dead." Throughout his desolate farming village of Muratbagi last week, the toll of dead, mostly women and children who were still indoors after the men left to work in the fields, continued to mount. The earthquake killed more than half of the village's 980 inhabitants, reducing the settlement to a heap of lonely rocks...
...Muratbagi was just one of 44 villages in mountainous eastern Turkey that suffered serious damage from the quake, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. By week's end the total number of dead had reached 1,339, nearly twice as many as in the celebrated San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The shock even succeeded in overshadowing the campaigning for Turkey's first national elections since the military seized power...
Although army helicopters arrived within two hours of the quake to begin evacuating the wounded, many who endured the initial shock may have suffocated to death. Further aggravating rescue efforts, the narrow dirt road that links Muratbagi to the outside world was blocked for hours by landslides. By the time rescue workers from the Swiss Disaster Relief brought in 15 specially trained dogs to sniff out more victims, most of those unearthed had stopped breathing...
...chilling. Already there have been reports from isolated villages of families having to fend off packs of wolves descending on their dead animals. With 30,000 of the area's livestock killed, even the farmers who weather the crisis may find themselves stripped of their livelihood. Survivors in Muratbagi last week spent every day laying the bodies of loved ones to rest and every night shivering in the cold...
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