A strong earthquake has hit Turkiye, causing buildings in the city of Istanbul to shake. The quake, taking place at 12:49 [09:49 GMT] on Wednesday in the Marmara Sea off the coast of Istanbul\u2019s Silvri area, registered a preliminary 6.2 magnitude, reports Turkiye\u2019s Disaster and Emergency Authority (AFAD). It was at a depth of 10km (6.21 miles), according to the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The initial quake was followed by three others with magnitudes of 4.4 to 4.9, Turkey\u2019s AFAD disaster management agency posted on X. As buildings shook, people rushed onto the streets where crowds of worried-looking people stared at their mobile phones for information or made calls, an AFP correspondent said. \u201cI just felt earthquake, I\u2019ve got to get out,\u201d said a shaken-looking decorator rushing out of a fourth floor apartment where he was working near the city\u2019s Galata Tower, who did not want to give his name. There were no immediate reports of damage, but people evacuated buildings as structures rumbled in the city, located on the European and Asian shores of the Bosphorus strait. Broadcaster TGRT reported that one person had been injured as a result of jumping off a balcony during the quake, which occurred during a public holiday in Turkiye. Kemal Cebi, the mayor of Kucukcekmece district in western Istanbul, told local broadcaster NTV that there were \u201cno negative developments yet\u201d but he reported that there were traffic jams and that many buildings were already at risk due to the density of the area. In a post on X, Turkiye\u2019s Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said emergency authorities have begun \u201cfield assessments\u201d and offered well wishes to those affected. AFAD warned people in the region against entering damaged buildings. The tremors could be felt as far away as Bulgaria, according to AFP journalists in the capital Sofia. Turkey is crossed by two major fault lines, and earthquakes are frequent. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake on February 6, 2023, and a second powerful tremor that came hours later, destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings in 11 southern and southeastern Turkish provinces, leaving more than 53,000 people dead. Another 6,000 people were killed in the northern parts of neighbouring Syria. While Istanbul was not impacted by that earthquake, the devastation heightened fears of a similar quake with experts citing the city\u2019s proximity to fault lines. In a bid to prevent damage from any future quake, both the national government and local administrations started urban reconstruction projects to fortify buildings at risk and started campaigns of demolishing buildings at risk of collapse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A strong earthquake has hit Turkiye, causing buildings in the city of Istanbul to shake. The quake, taking place at 12:49 [09:49 GMT] on Wednesday…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24143,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}