Family members wait and smoke. At four tractor-trailers parked nearby, the stacking of the dead continues. Some corpses already have been ferried, in trucks with open beds, to unmarked graves in a cemetery north of town. This is the aftermath of Aug. 17, a day that will live in infamy, with 3,000 dead in Adapazari alone, after one of the most powerful earthquakes this century rumbled through populous northwestern Turkey. One week after the quake, the world's front pages have gone on to other matters, but the Marmara region is no closer to making peace with the upheaval.
Mothers shed tears openly on street corners.
Fathers without jobs scrape pathetic moats around temporary shelters as torrential rains come down. As search teams and much of the foreign press go home, numbed by the staggering toll of casualties, the workers who stay behind continue to operate on high alert. In the city center, a team from the private, all-volunteer French group, Sauventeurs Securistes Amandinois, works for eight hours, without a break, to find a man rumored to be trapped in a pancaked apartment house. The search has all the earmarks of so many other failed explorations until shortly after lunchtime, when a team member thinks he hears a voice through the fiber-optic listening cable strung into the building. Searching for more signs of life, crews flank the building, making delicate probes with jackhammers and pickaxes, combing the building's lower reaches with a yellow Lab detector dog.