two new earthquakes recorded in the province of Hatay, already bruised by the earthquakes of February 6

Two new earthquakes, of magnitudes 6.4 and 5.8, were recorded Monday evening in the Turkish province of Hatay, in the south of the country, the Afad relief agency reported. This region has already been hit by the two earthquakes of February 6 which killed more than 41,000 people in Turkey.

>> “It’s our own Chernobyl”: after the earthquakes in Turkey, the huge national solidarity chain for the victims is activated in Istanbul

The first shock, whose epicenter was located in the locality of Defne, occurred at 8:04 p.m. (5:04 p.m. in Paris), according to Afad. It was felt very violently by AFP teams in Antakya and Adana, 200 km further north. It was followed three minutes later by a new earthquake of magnitude 5.8 in Samandag, a coastal town south of Antakya, reported Afad which fears “a sea level rise of up to 50 cm”.

“You don’t know what to do”

“We grabbed each other and right in front of us the walls started to crumble. It felt like the earth was opening up to swallow us up”an 18-year-old told AFP. “We were with Afad, which is looking for the bodies of our relatives when the earthquake surprised us. You don’t know what to do”he still confided.

According to Afad, more than 6,000 aftershocks following the earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 have been recorded for two weeks. The Turkish president announced on Monday the construction of 200,000 homes in the eleven provinces affected by the devastating earthquakes of February 6. “None of the buildings will be more than three or four stories tall”, said Recep Tayyip Erdogan from Hatay province. The earthquakes destroyed or severely damaged more than 118,000 buildings.