May 20, 2011. Earthquake strikes Turkey
| SOURCE: | Altegrity Risk International |
An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.9 on the Richter scale struck northwestern Turkey, killing at least two people and injuring at least 79 others, reports indicated on May 20th. The tremor struck just before midnight local time in the late evening hours of May 19th in the town of Simav, in Kutahya province. The quake was followed by around 50 aftershocks, the Kandilli observatory in Istanbul reported.
Turkey is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes because it sits on major geological fault lines. At least 51 people were killed in a 6.0 magnitude earthquake in eastern Turkey in March 2010. That earthquake came about a decade after two devastating earthquakes in 1999 struck the country with a magnitude of more than 7.0, which killed almost 20,000 people in densely populated parts of the northwestern region of Turkey.
Copyright © 2011, Altegrity Risk International, Inc.