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Vice: Doctors Warned This Turkish Hospital Was Unsafe. Then The Earthquakes Hit.

Original Article by: Alec Luhn | Photo: Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency via Getty

İSKENDERUN, TurkeyAnxious onlookers followed the stretcher with their eyes as a crane lifted it out of the rubble of the city’s state hospital.

Covered in a blanket, the person on it was small, just a boy, rescuers said. By the time he was pulled out almost three days after Monday’s earthquakes, he was dead. They carried him around the campfires in the yard and into the makeshift morgue next door, where body bags awaiting identification covered the floor.

“Everyone on the hospital lawn is hoping for that one miracle to be their kin,” Nazli Danis, a product manager for a tech startup in Istanbul, told VICE World News.


“The Turkish government has been preparing for an Istanbul earthquake for quite a while,” Miyamoto said. “On the southern border, they haven’t had an earthquake for 400 to 500 years, quite a long time ago, so if there’s nothing happening, people aren’t going to spend 5 percent of the value to retrofit a building.”

She would have to keep hoping. Her mother Tulin had been keeping the family’s ailing grandmother Keriman Garbioglu company overnight when the six-storey hospital building collapsed. Tulin had phoned Danis’s aunt just after the earthquake, but the line was silent when the aunt picked up. Was she still alive somewhere under…

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