Major earthquake in Turkey, Syria

 National Review:

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck near the Turkish-Syrian border early Monday morning followed by another magnitude 7.5 tremor hours later, claiming the lives of at least 1,600 people.
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“We do not know where the number of dead and injured can go,” Erdoğan told the press on Monday. More than 3,000 Turkish buildings were destroyed, he added.
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See, also:

 7.8-magnitude quake kills more than 1,300, knocks down buildings in southeast Turkey and Syria

 Powerful earthquake felt as far away as Cairo; many casualties feared

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Rescue workers and residents in multiple cities searched for survivors, working through tangles of metal and giant piles of concrete. A hospital in Turkey collapsed and patients, including newborns, were evacuated from a handful of facilities in Syria.

In the Turkish city of Adana, one resident said three buildings near his home collapsed. “I don’t have the strength anymore,” one survivor could be heard calling out from beneath the rubble as rescue workers tried to reach him, said the resident, journalism student Muhammet Fatih Yavus.

Farther east in Diyarbakir, cranes and rescue teams rushed people on stretchers out of a mountain of pancaked concrete floors that was once an apartment building.
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Turkey sits on top of major fault lines and is frequently shaken by earthquakes. Some 18,000 were killed in powerful earthquakes that hit northwest Turkey in 1999. The U.S. Geological Survey measured Monday’s quake at 7.8. At least 20 aftershocks followed, some hours later during daylight, the strongest measuring 6.6, Turkish authorities said.

Buildings were reported collapsed in a wide area extending from Syria’s cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330 kilometers (200 miles) to the northeast. Nearly 900 buildings were destroyed in Turkey’s Gaziantep and Kahramanmaras provinces, said Vice President Fuat Oktay. A hospital collapsed in the Mediterranean coastal city of Iskanderoun, but casualties were not immediately known, he said.
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That is one of the sides quake areas in recent memory.  The recovery effort will take some time and engineers will need to assess the surviving buildings for safety.