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Survivors of Haiti’s 2010 quake and those who lost loved ones at the Hotel Montana say they are forever bound by a shared tragedy that unfolded over three months as workers recovered bodies from the debris of the five-story hotel.

Once popular with foreign visitors, the hotel became a symbol of the disaster, its pancaked ruins shown frequently on TV. Eighty people, including 17 Americans, died there.

Those affected by the Montana tragedy say the year has been one of change, grief, acceptance and a recommitment to helping Haiti. They had a year of sadness, some marking birthdays and holidays for the first time with a loved one missing. For those who survived the collapse, it’s been a year of accepting that they lived while many others died.

Unshaken

“This was clearly one of those events that separates your life before and after,” says Woolley, 40, of Colorado Springs. Woolley spent 65 hours trapped in a pitch-black elevator shaft near the lobby. He was in the country to document the work of Compassion International, a Christian charity.

Woolley’s story became known for the blood-stained goodbye notes he wrote to his wife and two small boys in case he was not rescued. He used a first-aid app on his iPhone to treat his injuries. He spent the past year writing a book, Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana. He calls it a testament to the power of faith in difficult circumstances.

He was pulled out through the elevator shaft in a dramatic rescue by firefighters from Fairfax County, Va. He had a broken foot and a head injury. His colleague, David Hames, died. Woolley met his rescuers in June and visited them in December.

“I’ve had to wrestle with, do I celebrate?” he says. “Do I celebrate getting back with my family? Do I walk around morose because there was so much tragedy there? Rightly or wrongly, what I landed on is both.”

On Wednesday, Woolley was back in Haiti for the first time. He met with Gulley and other survivors at the hotel, which is being rebuilt. The only parts of the 145-room hotel left standing were a conference room and a few apartments.

Gulley, a Methodist minister, was trapped in another part of the lobby with five colleagues. He and Woolley could not see each other, but they talked about their faith and their families, giving each other courage during moments when rescue seemed unlikely, Woolley says.

Gulley’s group was underground for 55 hours. Two of his co-workers died.

Gulley, 65, of Frisco, Colo., says his experience deepened his commitment to Haiti. He has returned eight times, working with the church to help farmers.

“I serve God by serving people,” Gulley says. “Why would an earthquake change that?”

A new normal

The Gengel family is dealing with their loss by honoring the last wish of their oldest child. Britney texted her mother a few hours before the earthquake to say she had found her calling: She wanted to build an orphanage in Haiti.

As a student at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., Britney, 19, was in Haiti to work in orphanages. Three other Lynn students and two professors also were killed in the Montana.

Now her family plans to build the orphanage Britney dreamed of running. They started a foundation, Be Like Brit, to raise money for it. The 19,000-square-foot building will be in the shape of a B, says Len Gengel, 50.

They have the land overlooking a bay in Grand Goâve, a fishing village Britney was to visit on her trip, about an hour from the capital. Her parents hope to open the orphanage by 2012. They say it will have space for 33 girls and 33 boys — commemorating the 33 days Britney was under the rubble before her body was found.

“Any time you lose a child it’s unfathomable,” he says. “As her father, I feel an obligation to honor her wish.”

Lisa Birch, 47, is helping the Gengels, making blankets for the children to help them feel protected, she says.

“My heart is forever in Haiti, good, bad and ugly,” Birch says. “They need our help. This is personal to us.”

Jim Birch, 50, was in Haiti on a business trip. In the year since his death, Lisa and their daughter, Megan, moved from Modesto, Calif., to Seattle to be closer to relatives.

It’s been a year of emotional ups and downs. Just in the past week, Lisa Birch says, she was finally ready to put the photos from their last family Christmas in a scrapbook.

“We’ve gotten to the point where we know we have to stand on our own two feet,” she says.

Still, nights are especially hard. “It’s lonesome,” she says. “It’s forever.”

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Article extracted from usatoday.com

Hurricane Tomas soaked Haiti’s crowded earthquake survivors’ camps and swamped coastal towns on Friday, triggering flooding and mudslides that killed at least seven people.

The center of the storm had cleared Haiti’s northern coast by nightfall and Haitian authorities believed the worst was over but meteorologists warned there was still a threat from ongoing rain.

“Now that, relatively speaking, Haiti has escaped the danger, we have to continue to be vigilant,” Haitian President Rene Preval said at the presidential palace.

Four people died in the southwestern province of Grande Anse, two in South province and one at Belle Anse in South-East province, said Haiti’s civil protection director, Alta Jean-Baptiste.

Scattered flooding was reported in the coastal towns of Les Cayes, Jacmel and Leogane.

In the capital Port-au-Prince, still scarred from a devastating January 12 earthquake, hundreds of thousands of homeless quake survivors huddled under rain-drenched tent and tarpaulin shelters in muddy encampments. The quake killed more than a quarter of a million people.

The United Nations and relief agencies have gone on maximum alert to prepare for the risk of another humanitarian catastrophe in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, which is already reeling from a deadly cholera epidemic on top of the widespread quake destruction.

The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the storm could have dealt a far worse blow.

“We have been incredibly lucky on this one. The flooding is still serious, particularly in Leogane, because of the cholera situation …. For once Haiti has been lucky,” said OCHA spokeswoman Imogen Wall.

Out of the 1.3 million quake survivors in the capital’s temporary camps, only some were able to evacuate to more secure structures with family or friends, or in schools or government shelters.

Wind from Tomas blew down some tents at camps for displaced people in the southern coastal city at Jacmel, and a river burst its banks in Leogane, pouring water into the town west the capital.

In Port-au-Prince, many people went about their business on Friday amid intermittent rain.

“Heavy rains did not come but I’m still not happy because my home has lots of holes in it and a lot of water got inside,” said Solange Louis-Charles, 40, as she washed plates outside her house, which was made of corrugated iron and tarpaulins.

At 8 p.m. (0000 GMT), the center of the storm was north of Haiti, about 135 miles east of Guantanamo, Cuba, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. It had crossed into the Atlantic and was headed for the Turks and Caicos Islands and southeastern Bahamas.

Its top winds had dropped to 75 miles per hour (120 km per hour) but it was expected to strengthen again before starting to fizzle on Sunday. Tomas was still a Category 1 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, but just barely.

By reuters.com

A Haitian walks under the rain in the early morning while Hurricane Tomas passes in Port-au-Prince November 5, 2010.

Soldiers loaded men, women and crying children into trucks as rocks and debris hurled in the air and down the mountain’s slopes. The danger zone was widened from 10 kilometers from the glowing crater to 15 kilometers.

Indonesia’s deadly volcano erupted on Wednesday with its biggest blast yet, shooting searing ash miles into the sky and forcing the hasty evacuations of panicked villagers and emergency shelters near the base of the mountain.

Soldiers loaded men, women and crying children into trucks as rocks and debris hurled in the air and down the mountain’s slopes. No new casualties were reported immediately after the booming explosion that lasted more than an hour.

“This is an extraordinary eruption, triple from the first” on Oct. 26, said Mr Surono, a state volcanologist.

Tens of thousands of villagers have been evacuated from Mount Merapi, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, since it began erupting just over a week ago, killing 38 people, most from severe burns.

The danger zone was widened on Wednesday from 10 kilometers from the glowing crater to 15 kilometers because of the heightened threat.

“I (didn’t) think of anything else except to save my wife and son. We left my house and everything,” said Tentrem Wahono, 50, who lives in Kaliurang village, about 10 kilometers from the peak. He and his family fled on a motorbike, “racing with the explosive sounds as the searing ash chased us from behind.”

The last eruption has raised Merapi’s status to “crisis” condition, said Andi Arief, a special staff at the presidential office dealing with disaster and social assistance.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 235 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanos because it sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped string of faults that lines the Pacific.

As a reminder of that, a 6.1-magnitude quake hit waters off the eastern province of Papua on Wednesday evening, rattling several villages but causing no known damage or casualties.

The volcano’s initial blast on Oct. 26 occurred less than 24 hours after a towering tsunami slammed into remote islands on the western end of the country, sweeping entire villages to sea and killing at least 428 people. In both cases, relief operations are expected to take weeks, possibly months.

By thehindu.com

Mount Merapi pyroclastic flow as it erupts as seen from Deles, Central Java, Indonesia on tuesday.

The decision by thousands of workers to flee their buildings when a 5.0 magnitude earthquake struck Quebec on Wednesday put them in more danger than if they had found a safe place inside, according to a disaster expert.

The tremor hit at 1:41 p.m. ET south of Echo Lake, Que., 60 kilometres north of Ottawa near the Ontario border and was felt across southern and eastern Ontario and western Quebec, as well as in some U.S. states.

The quake caused the acting mayor of Gracefield, Que., a small town about 50 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre, to ask for emergency assistance after a number of buildings were damaged.

In Ottawa and Gatineau, the quake sent thousands of workers streaming out of office towers and onto the streets, where they awaited word as to whether it was safe to return.

But Prof. Paul Kovacs of the University of Western Ontario said the city workers did the wrong thing.

“Parts of the outside of the building are the most likely to fall and hit you,” said Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.

“If you move inside of a building or outside of a building during an earthquake that is one of the most dangerous things to do,” Kovacs said.

Images from the past year of Haiti and Chile, where buildings collapsed after more powerful quakes struck, might have led many people to flee. But Kovacs said while people should leave a building if they feel it is poorly constructed or unsafe, most of Ottawa’s buildings are designed to handle quakes.

Janet Drysdale, a seismologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, said if people do leave a building, they should also move a safe distance away, which many people did not do on Wednesday in Ottawa’s downtown core.

Both Kovacs and Drysdale said the safe thing to do in a secure building is get under a secure desk, cover your head to protect it and wait for the quake to end.

Schools in Ottawa’s two biggest school boards and all but one federal building in the National Capital Region were open Thursday morning after passing inspections in the aftermath of Wednesday’s earthquake.

Structural engineers inspected 19 schools with the Ottawa Carleton District School Board, and similar checks were also made at the Ottawa Catholic School Board.

All schools were deemed safe.

Public Works has reopened every federal building in the National Capital Region except for Place du Portage’s Phase 3 building, which is still undergoing structural inspections.

But Thursday is Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, a provincial holiday in Quebec, so few employees are expected to need to go into the building.

The impact of the quake was felt more north of Ottawa, particularly in Gracefield. Seven buildings — including the town’s 98-year-old church — were damaged, town officials said.

“Right now we have the church that has been affected very badly,” said the acting mayor of Gracefield, Claude Blais, adding that the church was a popular tourist attraction in the town.

A section of Highway 307 near Bowman, Que., north of Ottawa, collapsed into a river as a result of the quake, shutting down that route.

In Montreal, some people felt the rumble — but some didn’t even realize the city had been hit by an earthquake. The tremors, which lasted about 30 seconds, rattled buildings in Toronto and Ottawa, as well as government offices across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Que.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the two largest quakes in western Quebec occurred in 1935 at magnitude 6.1 and in 1732 at magnitude 6.2. The latter caused significant damage in Montreal.

The agency said earthquakes cause significant damage in the region about once a decade. Smaller earthquakes are felt three or four times a year.

BY CBCNews

A cleanup crew surveys the damage to a church in Gracefield, Que., after the earthquake Wednesday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press).

SHANGHAI—Rescuers used shovels, pry bars and their bare hands to dig through the rubble of collapsed homes and schools as they raced to find survivors of a severe earthquake that authorities said killed about 400 people and injured roughly 10,000 in a remote, predominantly Tibetan community in western China.

The quake hit shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday, jolting mountainous Yushu prefecture, part of the Chinese province of Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau, and flattening most of the town of Jiegu, one of the area’s main population centers. About 97% of the people in Yushu are ethnically Tibetan. Many earn their living raising yaks, sheep and horses.

As darkness fell and temperatures dipped below freezing in Jiegu, hundreds of soldiers, troops from the paramilitary People’s Armed Police and other emergency workers searched the wreckage looking for signs of life. Injured townspeople were being treated at improvised medical centers in the town’s central square and at a horse-racing track, officials said.

“We are short of equipment,” said Guoyang Zhaxi, a 42-year-old resident helping to free survivors. “So the speed of the rescue efforts is very slow.” He said nearly all houses in the town—many of which used traditional wood-and-earth construction—had been destroyed. “We need to hurry up or the people who are buried will have no hope,” he said.

Chinese seismologists said the quake had a magnitude of 7.1. The U.S. Geologic Survey said the magnitude was 6.9. A series of aftershocks continued throughout the day. Specialized search and rescue teams as well as hundreds of soldiers were being sent to Yushu from elsewhere in China to assist in the hunt for survivors.

Rescuers said their first priority was schools, where there could be large concentrations of casualties. Zhuohuaxia, a spokesman for Yushu prefecture, told the official Xinhua news agency that “many students are buried.” Xinhua reported that at least 30 people were trapped when a dormitory building at the Yushu Ethnic Normal School collapsed.

Wednesday’s quake in Qinghai also toppled dormitories and other buildings of the Yushu Primary School, where five students were killed, a teacher at the school told Xinhua. “Some pupils ran out of the dorms alive, and those who had not escaped in time were buried,” said the teacher, identified only by the surname Chang.

One of the most politically sensitive legacies of the massive 2008 earthquake that devastated large parts of southwestern China’s Sichuan province was disputes between parents and the government over the deaths of thousands of students killed when their schools collapsed on them.

Officials said a year ago that 5,335 students were among the 86,633 dead and missing from the 2008 quake. If accurate, that figure would mean school children didn’t suffer disproportionately in the disaster, despite evidence of shoddy school construction that drew the ire of grieving parents. The government took stern measures to silence protests.

Tibet activist groups say that Yushu prefecture and Jiegu town were the scenes of protest activities by Tibetan students and others in 2008, when a wave of unrest swept through Tibetan areas of China. In March that year, bloody riots erupted in Lhasa, and widespread demonstrations by Tibetans led to a crackdown by security forces.

Many Tibetans chafe at what they say are government restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices, and complain that they have missed out on the country’s economic boom. The rural per capita net income in Yushu is about $340 a year, less than half the national average.

Ethnic Tibetan residents of Yushu reached by phone Wednesday said relations between them and China’s majority Han Chinese, and between locals and the government, weren’t strained. Residents said Tibetans and soldiers and armed police from local garrisons worked side-by-side to save lives.

Guoyang Zhaxi said he and employees of his trading and real-estate company had pulled 30 people from the rubble alive, four of whom, including an infant, later died, he said. He said soldiers and police labored to move heavy steel-reinforced concrete slabs to reach survivors trapped below.

A soldier surnamed Li, interviewed by China National Radio, said many people remained trapped in fallen buildings and could be heard calling for help. Local officials said they needed heavy excavating equipment to reach more victims and medical supplies to treat the injured.

Survivors pitched tents and prepared to sleep outside. Relief officials said they would be bringing in thousands of tents, as well as quilts and warm clothes. Temperatures are expected to fall well below freezing overnight. Meteorologists said there was a chance of snow in the area on Friday.

By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH

A Chinese official says 80 per cent of the buildings have collapsed in the worst-hit town of Jiegu.

A major earthquake has shaken Indonesia’s northwest island of Sumatra, prompting a brief tsunami warning and sending residents rushing for higher ground.

The U.S. Geological Survey says a 7.7 magnitude earthquake occurred at sea about 215 kilometers northwest of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The quake was felt throughout northern Sumatra and in Malaysia. Local news reports say that patients from some area hospitals were evacuated and that some residents fled to high ground in case of a tsunami. Electricity in some areas was cut off but so far no major damage has been reported.

The Indonesia Meteorology and Geophysics Agency issued a tsunami warning following the quake, but lifted it two hours later.

Susan Potter, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, says because the earthquake originated deep below the surface of the earth, the chances of it producing a major tsunami are low.

“This earthquake occurred at approximately 31 kilometers. To be an extremely shallow earthquake, it would be around 10 kilometers or so,” said Potter.  “An extremely large earthquake above the magnitude eight that was an extremely shallow depth, around a depth of 10 kilometers, would be prime candidate for creating, I am not saying definitely a large tsunami, but perhaps a regional tsunami or a tsunami in general. So the deeper the earthquake occurs, the less likely it is to cause a large scale tsunami.”

Earthquakes are common in this region. Indonesia is located on the Pacific Ocean’s so-called Ring of Fire, where the continental plates meet. A 9.1 magnitude quake off Aceh in December 2004 triggered a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

Stephen Almsteier has been a development worker in Aceh for the last five years. He says he has felt hundreds of earthquakes in this region and that this last one, and the aftershocks that followed, were not that strong.

“Obviously after several years here we’re kind of used to aftershocks. People react in a different way,” said Almsteier.  “Once I realized that the aftershock was over I didn’t leave my room, but obviously enough people here are very traumatized and some people did leave their houses and rooms in the center of town.”

The U.S. Geological Survey says earthquakes of magnitude 7 and above occur on average 17 times a year.

Residents flee their homes after an earthquake in Singkil, Aceh province on Sumatra island, Indonesia

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

In Haiti, some were pulled from the rubble, their legal advocates say. Some lost parents, siblings or children. Many were seeking food, safety or medical care at the Port-au-Prince airport when terrifying aftershocks prompted hasty evacuations by military transports, with no time for immigration processing. None have criminal histories.

But when they landed in the United States without visas, they were taken into custody by immigration authorities and held for deportation, even though deportations to Haiti have been suspended indefinitely since the earthquake. Legal advocates who stumbled on the survivors in February at the Broward County Transitional Center, a privately operated immigration jail in Pompano Beach, Fla., have tried for weeks to persuade government officials to release them to citizen relatives who are eager to take them in, letters and affidavits show.

The largest aftershock since Chile’s devastating earthquake rocked the South American country Thursday minutes before the inauguration of President Sebastian Pinera.

The 7.2-magnitude aftershock was stronger than the Jan. 12 quake that devastated the Haitian capital. It happened along the same fault zone as Chile’s magnitude-8.8 quake on Feb. 27, said geophysicist Don Blakeman at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado.

“When we get quakes in the 8 range, we would expect to see maybe a couple of aftershocks in the 7 range,” he said.

Blakeman said Chile now can expect to feel “aftershocks of the aftershock.”

“It’s not a sign of anything different happening. But what does occur when you get these large aftershocks, typically we have a whole series of aftershocks again,” Blakeman said.

The temblor rocked buildings and shook windows in the capital, and provoked nervous smiles among dignitaries arriving for the ceremony at the congressional building in coastal Valparaiso. Bolivian President Evo Morales seemed briefly disoriented and Peru’s Alan Garcia joked that it gave them “a moment to dance.”

Buildings emptied and streets crowded with people seeking higher ground in coastal Constitucion, a city wiped out by the tsunami that followed the quake. Pinera planned to visit the city shortly after his swearing-in.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Two strongly felt earthquakes have rocked central Chile as dignitaries arrive for the inauguration of President-elect Sebastian Pinera.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the first quake had a preliminary magnitude of 5.1 and the second registered at 7.2. Both rocked buildings in the capital, shook windows and provoked nervous smiles among dignitaries arriving for Thursday’s ceremony at the congressional building in coastal Valparaiso.

Bolivian President Evo Morales seemed briefly disoriented. Peru’s Alan Garcia joked that it gave them “a moment to dance.”

Homes in eastern areas of Turkey prone to earthquakes must be better built to withstand jolts like the magnitude 6 temblor that toppled village houses and killed 51 people this week, the Turkish government acknowledged Tuesday.

Hundreds of quake survivors sheltered overnight in tents after being left homeless by Monday’s pre-dawn quake, which exposed Turkey’s lag in constructing sturdy homes near the country’s two major fault lines.

Health Minister Recep Akdag said the mud-brick homes typical of Turkey’s impoverished villages “topple down in the slightest of jolts, and those caught beneath die from lack of air.”

“It has been this way for a hundred years, and we have to beat this,” Akdag said.

The earthquake — which hit at 4:32 a.m. Monday (0232 GMT, 9 p.m. EST Sunday) near the remote village of Basyurt in Elazig province — caught many people in their sleep, shaking the area’s poorly made buildings into piles of rubble. Worst hit appeared to be the Okcular, where 19 of the village’s 900 residents were killed and only a few homes remain standing.

The Kandilli seismology center said there have been more than 100 aftershocks, including one measuring 5.5, since the initial quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey listed as having a magnitude of 5.9.

The region 340 miles (550 kilometers) east of the capital, Ankara, is near the East Anatolian Fault — one of the two major fault lines that cross Turkey.

The other is the North Anatolian Fault, which runs near Turkey’s largest city of Istanbul.

Experts cite a two-thirds chance that a major quake will hit Istanbul within 30 years. Others estimate a 2 percent annual probability of a large temblor in the city that his home to 15 million people, or one-fifth of Turkey’s population.

Despite two massive quakes killing some 18,000 people in northwest Turkey in 1999, seismologists and civil engineers warn that not enough has been done to protect Istanbul in the event of another strong temblor in the region.

Istanbul itself planned to assess the city’s buildings to identify those needing reinforcement or demolition, but experts say the follow-up work has lagged. Part of the problem, some say, is a lack of oversight in construction.

“It is not small earthquakes that kill people, it is unlicensed constructors and disorderly construction that kill,” the Ankara-based Tum civil engineers federation said in a statement.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed many of the 51 deaths from Monday’s quake on the shoddy mud-brick buildings typical of the eastern region.

He pledged the government housing agency would build quake-proof homes in the area.

“We must ensure building resilience,” Labor Minister Faruk Celik said. “We are living on the earthquake zone, and we don’t know what can happen to us from one day to the next.”

Authorities urged the people in Elazig province not to enter damaged homes that could collapse from aftershocks.

Most of the 51 people killed in Monday’s quake were immediately buried according to Muslim traditions, but a few funerals were put off until Tuesday.

Fifteen of the deaths occurred in Yukari Demirci village, four in Kayalik village, another four in Gocmezler village, and 10 died in hospital in Kovancilar town, officials said.

Survivors crowded around bonfires to keep warm overnight while sheltering in makeshift tents made of plastic sheeting provided by the Turkish Red Crescent. The government said it also sent prefabricated homes and mobile kitchens. Hard money training.

A strong, pre-dawn earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6 struck eastern Turkey on Monday, killing 57 people as it knocked down stone or mud-brick houses and minarets in at least six villages, the government said.

Turkey’s crisis center said about 100 other people were injured in the quake, which hit at 4:32 a.m. (0232 GMT, 9 p.m. EST Sunday) in Elazig province, about 340 miles (550 kilometers) east of Ankara, the capital.

The earthquake, which caught many people as they slept, was centered near the village of Basyurt and followed by more than 50 aftershocks, the strongest measuring 5.5 and 5.3, the Kandilli seismology center said.

The worst-hit area was the village of Okcular, where some 17 people were killed and homes crumbled into piles of dirt. As relatives rushed in for news of their loved ones, authorities blocked access to Okcular so ambulances and rescue teams could maneuver on the village’s narrow roads. Villagers lit fires to keep warm.

“The village is totally flattened,” village administrator Hasan Demirdag told private NTV television.

Ali Riza Ferhat of Okcular said he was woken up by the jolt.

“I tried to get out of the door but it wouldn’t open. I came out of the window and started helping my neighbors,” he told NTV television. “We removed six bodies.”

Another 13 people were killed in the village of Yukari Demirci, Gov. Muammer Erol said, adding that by noon everyone had been removed from the rubble and there was no one left buried inside the debris.

“Everything has been knocked down, there is not a stone in place,” said Yadin Apaydin, administrator for the village of Yukari Kanatli, where he said at least three people died.

The quake was also felt in the neighboring provinces of Tunceli, Bingol and Diyarbakir, where residents fled to the streets in panic and stayed outdoors. Schools were closed for two days in the region. In Tunceli province, students were sent home after the quake caused a school’s walls to crack, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The Elazig quake follows deadly temblors in Haiti and Chile, but Bernard Doft, the seismologist for the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, said there was no direct connection between the three.

“These events are too far apart to be of direct influence to each other,” he said.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kandilli Observatory’s director, Mustafa Erdik, urged residents not to enter any damaged homes, warning that they could topple from aftershocks that Erdik said could last for days.

Erdogan blamed the mud-brick constructions for the deaths and said the government was instructing its housing agency to construct quake-prone homes in the area.

Television footage showed rescue workers and soldiers at Okcular lifting debris as villagers looked on. Rescuers dug into the dirt, finding the body of an elderly man, and quickly covered him with a sheet.

Two women sat on mattresses wrapped in blankets. The temblor also knocked down barns, killing farm animals.

Turkey’s Red Crescent organization sent tents and blankets to the region. Erdogan said ambulance helicopters, prefabricated homes and mobile kitchens were also being sent.

Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, much of which lies on top of two main fault lines. In 1999, two powerful earthquakes struck northwestern Turkey, killing about 18,000 people.

In 2007, an earthquake measuring 5.7 damaged buildings in Elazig, briefly trapping a woman under debris. In 2003, an earthquake measuring 6.4 magnitude collapsed a school dormitory in the neighboring province of Bingol, killing 83 children. The collapse was blamed on poor construction. Hard money training.