‘IT FeeLS LIKe yeSTerdAy’: TUrKey qUAKe overTUrNS LIveS

KAHRAMANMARAS, TURKEY

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BEFOREthe Turkish earthquake, Abdullah Senel had nerves of steel. But these days, just being inside a house makes him nervous — and it only takes the sound of a plane flying overhead to put him on edge.

“I was fearless in the past, but now a single noise is enough to freak me out,” the 57-year-old former weightlifter told AFP.

“Everything reminds me of the earthquake — even the sound of a plane,” he said.

Last month’s devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake flattened entire cities, killing more than 50,000 people across southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria.

In Kahramanmaras, a Turkish city near the quake’s epicentre, survivors remain haunted by the trauma one month on.

“It’s been a month now but for me, it feels like yesterday,” said Adem Serin as he watched heavy machines remove the piles of rubble in the complex of high- rises where hundreds lost their lives.

“We couldn’t get over the shock. I was caught by the quake on the 11th floor of a high-rise building,” said Serin, whose wife is five months pregnant.

“I can still hear the screams of people crying for help on every floor. This pain will never go away.” Efforts to remove the ubiquitous rubble now dominate the city of 1.1 million people. Workers who arrived from all over Turkey spray water on the debris and rubble-laden trucks trundle along the road waiting to dump the waste into a landfill outside the city. – Clouds of dust –Columns of dust emerging from the clean-up cover the horizon, carried by the