I have found that using the website Relief Web has given me a good look at what types of disasters are going on currently worldwide. It is an interesting website that shows different natural disasters and the intensity of these disasters on the website’s map. They use hot spot analysis in order to project these disasters on the map. The next natural disaster that I found interesting on this website was the earthquake in Turkey that occurred in October of 2011. This specific event occurred on Sunday, October 23 2001 at 10:41 UTC. The magnitude of this earthquake was measured on the Rictor Scale at 7.1. As far as the damage goes, at least 534 people were killed, 2,300 people were injured, and 14,618 buildings were destroyed or damaged in the Ercis-Tabanli-Van area. After the earthquake had hit, rescue efforts had been slightly delayed because telecommunications, electricity, as well as water services were disrupted. Some of the many areas in the regions that felt this monster included eastern Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran and parts of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. These earthquakes anywhere above a 6.0 have been causing a lot of destruction lately all around the world, thus causing rescue teams to get more practice in and be better prepared for the next big disaster the world throws at them.
As it turns out time and time again, rescue teams are not the first type of rescue that occurs during a natural disaster. The people who get to the scene first are actually the survivors of the disaster that are attempting to put their safety at jeopardy in order to help others. It is an interesting topic, that when human life is at stake people will bury their everyday selfishness and help their fellow man escape certain death, even if it may mean sacrificing their own life for the lives of others. This class has taught me that this is how humans are built and when put in this position they will always make the correct choice. In the reports on this event, it is said that the survivors began grabbing shovels and using their hand in order to dig out victims that were caught within the rubble and had only hours to live. This is the goodness in humanity that I have found this semester. After seeing all the hate and violence in the world that happens these days, it is incredible to see the true nature and character of humanity when something so terrible happens that it literally brings out the good in people.
Eventually the rescue teams came on the scene within the hour and began assisting the victims out of the rubble. They used a wide variety of technology in order to do this such as GPS and robot machines used for the digging. Below I have a video of this particular incident that shows what happened to these people and how they wer assisted to escape this terrible disaster in Turkey:
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