Floods of a magnitude unprecedented for decades in Turkey have left at least 31 dead in the north of the country, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited on Friday August 13 to pledge the necessary support to the victims.
According to a provisional report from the government agency responsible for natural disasters (AFAD), 29 people died in the province of Kastamonu, located on the shores of the Black Sea, and two in the neighboring province of Sinop. An unknown number of people were also missing.
The floods, caused by heavy rainfall overnight Tuesday through Wednesday, came at a time when Turkey was barely recovering from large fires, which left eight people dead and ravaged southern tourist areas.
For many experts, natural disasters like the ones that follow one another in this country are likely to become more frequent and more violent due to global warming caused by human activity.
Sign of the gravity of the situation, the Turkish president went on Friday to one of the areas hardest hit by the floods, the district of Bozkurt, in the province of Kastamonu, where, in particular, an eight-story apartment building s ‘collapsed. “Your pain is the pain of all of us. The State stands by your side with all its means ”, Erdogan said, before attending the funeral of the victims.
Anger of the inhabitants against the authorities
Shocked, some survivors began to express their anger against the local authorities, accusing them of not having reacted quickly enough to bring the population to safety.
“We were only told to take our vehicles to safety, as the river was in danger of overflowing. We were not told to save our lives or those of our children ”, lamented Arzu Yücel, whose two twin daughters and in-laws disappeared after their building collapsed. “If we had been warned, we would have left in less than five minutes (…) We were not asked to evacuate ”, she added sobbing, quoted by the DHA news agency.
As a result of heavy precipitation, in some cities, the water reached up to four meters in height, according to the authorities, and the streets of entire cities turned into torrents carrying cars and all kinds of debris.
Adem Senol, 75, saw water surrounding his house in Bartin province in a few minutes. “Never in my life had I seen such a thing”, he told the state-run Anatolia news agency. “The water rose higher than our windows, broke our door and even the wall of our garden”, he added.
“This is the worst flood that I have ever seen”Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said on Thursday during a trip to the disaster areas. Images broadcast on television and on social media showed villagers taking refuge on the roofs of their homes being evacuated by helicopter. Several road bridges also collapsed after landslides. Nearly 200 villages were still without electricity on Friday, authorities said.
Faced with the rising waters, the emergency services had to evacuate 45 patients from a hospital in the coastal region of Sinop. Meteorological services forecast continued precipitation over the affected areas for the remainder of the week.
The Turkish regions bordering the Black Sea are frequently prey to flooding. Last month, six people died in Rize, in the northeast. After the repeated natural disasters that have hit Turkey, several politicians and associations have stepped up pressure on Mr. Erdogan to take radical measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Turkey is one of the few countries which did not adopt the Paris climate agreement of 2015. With two years of elections which already promise to be difficult for Mr. Erdogan against a background of economic problems, these natural disasters constitute a political issue.