ISLAHIYE, Turkey — A week after a devastating earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, with families crowded under tarps and cardboard shelters, a severe shortage of tents, housing and medical supplies is imperiling relief efforts, leaving survivors struggling amid ruins and in extreme cold.
The death toll for both countries surpassed 35,000 on Monday, and more than 1 million people were left homeless in Turkey alone, according to the Turkish government. One of the most urgent needs was shelter to help the thousands of people whose homes were either destroyed or may be unsafe.
In the towns and cities in the earthquake zone, people appeared to be crowded everywhere except inside the cracked and unstable buildings where they had once worked and lived. Large apartment towers stood dark and empty, while tents and makeshift shelters filled parks, sidewalks, and the courtyards of mosques.
Conditions were dire enough that Bashar Assad, the authoritarian president of Syria, decided to open two more aid crossings from Turkey into northwest Syria, where opposition forces control territory, the United Nations announced Monday.
The decision, which would allow aid to flow across the border for three months, was the first time that Assad has agreed to open the crossings to humanitarian aid since Syria’s civil war began in 2011.
Aid has only trickled into opposition-held areas, and Bab al-Hawa, the only U.N.-approved border crossing between Turkey and Syria for transporting international aid, had been a lifeline for such areas in the north.
The lack of food, clothing, medicine, shelter, and warmth was acute all over the region. At a campsite across the street from a collapsed building in Kahramanmaras, a Turkish city near the epicenter, one family struggled to stay warm around a fire of whatever it could burn.
“I couldn’t think about eating,” said Zeynep Omac, sitting on wooden benches with her two children, 9 and 14, near a plume of acrid smoke. “I just give the kids snacks I can find.”
Omac and her children had left their apartment during the earthquake in their pajamas. “I try to find clothes from there,” she said, pointing toward a pile of clothes on the pavement, the remnants of some aid that had reached the city.
Across the street, workers searched for bodies in the rubble, their hopes of finding survivors dimming so long after the building fell. Omac, 38, said she had relatives under the debris: a niece and nephew of her husband. She was waiting for the rescuers to pull their relatives out, alive or dead.
Turkey’s national emergency management agency, AFAD, has distributed a huge quantity of tents — with the help of more than 238,000 relief workers — but the sheer scale of the disaster has meant many still lack shelter.
Many people cobbled debris together to erect what they could: One family, numbering about a dozen people, built a shelter of cardboard and tarp over a flatbed truck, with blankets and thin mattresses in the beds.
The Turkish Red Crescent, a humanitarian group, said it was speeding up the production of tents to house people after the Turkish news media reported a shortage of temporary housing and poor sanitary conditions for the homeless.
Although the authorities occasionally reported a harrowing rescue — like Istanbul’s mayor celebrating the escape of a woman after 175 hours underneath rubble — fewer and fewer survivors were found Monday. In Turkey and Syria, aid workers largely turned their attention toward the people without food, medicine and homes. In both countries, bad weather and damaged roads have slowed the flow of aid.
Martin Griffiths, the top humanitarian chief at the U.N., said Monday that the window for rescuing people from the rubble was “coming to a close” and that the focus was moving to provide homes, food, schooling and psychological care to victims.
Although aid is flowing into Turkey, relatively little has reached parts of northern Syria held by the opposition because of political divisions after years of civil war. Much of the aid that has been sent to Syria has not always contained the most urgently needed supplies, such as food.
Mazen Aloush, a spokesperson for Turkish-backed opposition groups on the Syrian side of the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, said, “The only aid we received in the past days until this moment are tents, equipment, blankets, and detergents and mattresses.”
As President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey came under criticism for his government’s response to the earthquake, Turkish officials Monday detained more property developers and others suspected of having a hand in shoddy construction that violated building codes, according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency. Experts have said that poor construction most likely exacerbated the deadliness of the earthquake.
One of the latest people to be detained was Ibrahim Mustafa Uncuoglu, a contractor of a collapsed building in the southern city of Gaziantep, Anadolu reported. Bekir Bozdag, Turkey’s justice minister, said Sunday that legal proceedings against more than 130 people were underway over their apparent ties to collapsed buildings.
Separately, Turkish police said in a statement Monday that authorities had detained 56 people and arrested 14 of them, without specifying charges, on accusations that they had spread disinformation about the earthquake.
The earthquake, measuring 7.8 magnitudes and followed by an aftershock nearly as strong, is already Turkey’s deadliest since 1939. The death toll there is now more than 31,600; in northwestern Syria, more than 3,500 people have died. Hospitals, lacking sufficient medical supplies, have struggled to care for the large numbers of people requiring urgent help.
In Syria, where the earthquake hit areas controlled by the government and others held by opposition forces backed by Turkey, the U.N. has struggled to deliver aid across the front lines.
Over the past week, the U.N. has sent more than 50 trucks, with materials including blankets and medical equipment, across the border to Syria from Turkey, and at least six more trucks were sent Monday.
Recovery efforts have been stymied by the lack of fuel, machinery, and vehicles, as well as aftershocks, which were reportedly continuing in northwestern Syria and forcing people to flee their homes, the U.N. said.
In Adiyaman, in southwest Turkey, some survivors commiserated while they waited for help. During the earthquake, remembered Mustafa Dascan, 45, he fell through a second-story wall and landed on the sidewalk; his bed was still visible through a hole in the wall.
The taller building next door had fallen on it, dealing heavy damage to the house and destroying the back end of a black Peugeot parked nearby — a gift Dascan had recently bought his daughter for her 18th birthday.
Dascan managed to get his wife and three children out, and they moved to a village house with other families. But they still spent their time outside, in the cold.
“It is a solid house, but my kids are scared to go in, so depending on the weather, we sit in the yard or sleep in the car,” he said.
He was back in his ruined neighborhood, he said, “just to share the pain of my neighbors.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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