André Sousa is a Portuguese who, since 2020, has been traveling around the world on a motorcycle. At this moment he is in Gazientepe, a city in southeastern Turkey, very close to the epicenter of Monday’s earthquake. heard by TSFAndré Sousa says that he woke up at dawn with everything shaking.
“At 04:15 in the morning, everything started to shake. While I’m going around the world, this is the third earthquake that I’ve caught on the road. The first was in Greece, in 2020, the second was in Guatemala, last year at 7.2, and this 7.8 now. But this was a dimension that has nothing to do with the other two, it really was very strong and a person wakes up jumping on the bed and falling to the floor,” he says, in statements to TSF.
“If I could hide under the bed or under the desk, in my hotel room the bed doesn’t allow me to go under it and the desk has no space to hide. My only option was to try to get out of the building.” as soon as possible. I left my previous clothes, boxers, socks and a T-shirt, with zero degrees of temperature on the street, ”she recounts.
With the street covered in snow and debris, André Sousa found panic and pleas for God’s help. “Everyone was pushing, going out into the streets, and since it is an Islamic country, they were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, people were in panic, asking God for help, which makes the moment even heavier. square, the power has gone out, there is still no water, many buildings have completely collapsed”.
The hotel where André Sousa is staying escaped, but was badly damaged.
“While I was coming down, the entire interior of my hotel exploded, it began to jump everywhere, the walls cracked, the building was completely damaged by the magnitude of this earthquake. Outside, we couldn’t even get close to the buildings. , because everything was falling: the cladding, the tiles, the stones, you couldn’t see well, because there was no electricity, people were screaming, the main concern was getting to an area where there were no taller buildings”, he adds.
André Sousa also says that there have been many aftershocks, so he will spend most of the day at the hotel. If he leaves, it will only be to try to donate blood.
An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale left at least 912 dead in Turkey and 592 in Syria, as well as thousands injured in both countries. The epicenter of the quake was recorded in southern Turkey during the early hours of the morning.
A few hours later, a new earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale struck southeastern Turkey, according to the US Geological Survey.
Source: TSF
