Turkey earthquake updates: death toll has risen to 366 overnight.

At least 366 people are now known to have died and over 1,300 injured after the Sunday’s deadly earthquake in the eastern Turkey.

Turkish government said 12,000 more tents would be delivered to the cities of Ercis and Van and also to nearby villages affected by the 7.2-magnitude earthquake.

The government has been accused of failing to help some of the most needy people, who spent the second night in freezing conditions without heating and tents.

 

 

On Tuesday, the Disaster and Emergency Administration said that more than 2,000 houses collapsed due to the quake.

Rescue teams with sniffer dogs continued through the night to search for survivors under the rubble of hundreds of collapsed buildings.

Cranes and other heavy equipment have been lifting slabs of concrete, and many residents have been joining in the rescue effort, digging with shovels.

It was reported that hopes of finding more survivors are fading, with no-one being pulled alive in the last seven to eight hours.

In one building there are fears that up to 50 are missing – buried under the rubble.

Authorities are now warning that the death toll is expected to rise further.

Besir Atalay,Turkish Deputy Prime Minister, who is in charge of the relief operation, said late on Monday that “from today there will be nothing our people lack”.

Authorities were also setting up more field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to return to their homes amid continuing aftershocks.

However, survivors complained that not enough help was reaching them.

“We spent the night under freezing temperature. We shivered all night long, nobody provided us any blankets or heaters, we don’t even have a toilet,” one woman said.

“People are getting sick. It is very dirty here.”

A resident of Van said that even tents were in short supply.

“All the nylon tents are on the black market now,” Ibrahim Baydar, a 40-year-old tradesman from Van.

“We cannot find any. People are queuing for them. No tents were given to us whatsoever.”

Opposition politicians earlier decried what they called “a lack of crisis management”, saying that many people still lacked food, heating and tents.

Opposition also said Ankara was wrong to refuse offers of foreign aid.

The 75,000 population of Ercis town, which has been the worst hit, has dozens of collapsed buildings.

Most of those destroyed buildings in Ercis are apartment blocks with dozens of people missing at each site.

Ercis and Van, about 100km (60 miles) to the south, lie on a high plateau surrounded by snow-capped mountains.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office visited the area on Sunday and said many villages made of mud brick had been almost completely destroyed.

Hurriyet Daily News reported that some of the rescue workers have complained of a lack of adequate equipment.

“We are working with primitive tools, we have no equipment,” one rescuer said.

Five people were pulled from the ruins of one collapsed building in Ercis on Monday after one of them called for help on his mobile phone, Anatolia news agency said.

Another man was rescued later on Monday, some 30 hours after the earthquake struck.

The earthquake struck at 13:41 (10:41 GMT) on Sunday at a depth of 20km (12 miles), with its epicenter 16km north-east of Van in eastern Turkey, according to US Geological Survey.

About 200 aftershocks have hit the region, it added, including one of magnitude 6.0 late on Sunday.

Turkey is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes because it sits on major geological fault lines.