A previously unfamiliar pink alert on my phone, an earthquake in southeastern Turkey. I have an app which monitors earthquakes. It was nerve-wracking when it was set to Indonesia, and of course it reported the earthquake outside Jakarta while I was at lunch, which ended the lives of many, but also at least 2-3 earthquakes daily as that’s life in Indonesia. I reset it to Turkey and got the occasional alert, but today it has been a barrage of alerts since that first 7.8 one, with every aftershock 10,000 times stronger the one in Blackpool that got itself a headline in the Guardian a few days ago. About half an hour ago there was another pink alert, 7.5 in magnitude and it took about 25 minutes for the breaking news to appear on the various websites. Since then, more aftershocks in the 4 or 5 region, all enough to feel.
I can’t imagine the horror of living through today, and worse, the horror of living through it buried in rubble, as many people must be. I think very many people will have died.
As for that earthquake app – maybe I should remove it from my phone. It is nervewracking, the constant updates, and if an earthquake happens in Istanbul I’ll either know about it or not, and in any case there is not much I would be able to do. My reason for it was to have a few seconds warning, but Istanbul is so close to the faults it would probably not make a difference.
Crushing definitely seems the worst death.