Gas and Water Emissions Are Never Good News

This morning I woke up to a geologist quoted in Today's Zaman as saying that the fault in the Sea of Marmara is producing gas and water emissions, indications that it is still very active.

I am frequently informed that there will not be another earthquake for at least another 25 years and do not talk about its possibility that much because it scares people who actually lived through the 1999 quake. I am just a leery outsider, but a leery outsider who lives in a very old building—the one next to mine fell down in 1999. The estimated death toll of the 1999 quake is 17,127 killed and 43,953 injured, but some figures place the count much higher and the accusation is that the government underestimated in order to avoid paying benefits to survivors. The quake measured a 7.4 on the Richter scale and its epicenter was Gölcuk, a bedroom community to İzmit that is also home to the Turkish Navy. The talk is that the next big quake will be in İstanbul and this is a scary fact considering that the population is estimated at 15 million. The good news is that the Turkish government has invested in equipment to monitor the quake so that it might make predictions about future activity and possible tsunamis.