It was eerily quiet in his hotel room in Turkey when Burton LeBlanc was awoken on Feb. 6. “As I got up, not just the bed was moving, but the entire floor of my room and the hotel. My first instinct was that it was an earthquake. A very eerie feeling.'
Burton LeBlanc, who grew up in Yarmouth and still has family there, was working in Turkey at the time a massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck. Although 500 kilometres from the epicenter, the quake woke him up in his hotel room, which was swaying back and forth. CONTRIBUTEDTURKEY – It was eerily quiet inside the room when Burton LeBlanc was woken up in the middle night.“I just remember being woken up to an extreme back-and-forth swaying motion,” LeBlanc says, thinking back to Feb. 6.
As of Feb. 19, around 41,000 people in southern Turkey were said to have died from the earthquake with another 4,000 people killed in neighbouring Syria. The death toll is expected to keep rising as more bodies are recovered from the devastation. Although LeBlanc was in a hotel over 500 kilometres from the epicenter when the earthquake hit, the quake was strong enough that he and others felt it.A second 7.5-quake followed hours later. And aftershocks kept coming in the minutes, hours and days afterward too, with reports of around 2,000 aftershocks since Feb. 6.“We definitely felt the quakes, in particular the first one just after 4 a.m.,” LeBlanc says.
But the massive destruction caused elsewhere has been on LeBlanc’s mind and the minds of people around the world.
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