"Every now and then rescue workers turn their machines off and ask this crowd to be totally silent. Then they call out "can anyone hear us?", hoping to get an answer from under the rubble."
On the 6th of February, 2023, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck south-eastern Turkiye, near the Syrian border.
More than 50,000 people were killed in Turkiye and almost 6,000 in Syria, while millions were left homeless.
It was followed closely by numerous aftershocks, including one quake which was almost as large as the first.
It was the deadliest earthquake in Turkiye's modern history.
Claudia Farhart was there.
"This morning, more than 100 hours after the first earthquake, they pulled 6 survivors from the rubble of this apartment building. They say they've just heard another noise and they think they might have found one more."
A “baptism by fire”... that’s how Claudia describes the beginning of her journalism career after starting out at a regional newspaper.
"I think it taught me a lot about how to really find a story when it looks like there isn't one. And that there really are stories everywhere, even in a relatively small place. It's just that feeling when you find a story that was really satisfying to me and you could get really, I'm pretty nerdy. You could get really nerdy about whatever it was you were interested in or chasing and you could end up down all sorts of rabbit holes and the people you'd meet and talk to and the conversations you'd have were so interesting, even from my very first semester as a student. And also the other people I was studying with or learning from or working with in the early years were the kind-- of people I wanted to be around. They were all people who were so fascinated by the work they were doing."
Claudia was 28-years-old when she put her hand up to cover the earthquake.
She says it quickly became apparent this event would be historic - and so her first ever international deployment was green-lit.
But as Claudia explains, when disaster strikes, there is often no time for emotional preparation.
"We had a few hours to prepare, which is always crazy trying to work out what you need to take into a disaster zone. We were doing things like packing, thermal, sleeping bags. We didn't know if there was going to be accommodation when we got there, there was really little information coming out from the area we were about to go into. So I think we were told at about midday that we were going and the flight was eight o'clock at night, so you've got to be there a few hours before. It was immediately get to the shops, get your jacket that can withstand this number of degrees below Celsius, below zero. There wasn't really time to sit and think about the logistics of actually doing the story in that first day. It was just all about preparing."
After the almost 24-hour journey from Sydney to Turkiye's capital, Ankara, Claudia and her cameraman drove to Adana - one of the southern cities on the edge of the epicentre.
"Any time you needed to get fuel, there was about a queue of a hundred cars at the petrol station because there are all these rumors going around, this is the last point that you'll be able to get fuel. So we're driving down this, it's one highway for six hours and we were one of the only cars going in that direction. All the other cars were going the other way back towards the capitol, getting out of the region. And other than us and a few other cars, it was mostly heavy trucks and machinery heading down there to do excavation work to start clearing the rubble away. And so when we stopped to get things like petrol and water from these service stations, we'd start talking to people. And it became clear pretty quickly that there was sort of not a single person who wasn't affected by it, just everyone you spoke to had a story."
It was straight to work for Claudia and her team - working from 6am to 1am most days to produce content for an Australian audience.
"It's working across two time zones. So we've got our show here, 6:30 in the evening, and another show at 10:30pm. So we'd be up by six finalizing anything we'd need to do for our packages, which we were filing every day. We'd try to fit in a quick breakfast because once we left the hotel, there was no guarantee where there was going to be food available. Sometimes we'd drive hours to get into a different town in the epicenter. We'd do our live cross and then after that filing, collecting whatever we needed to for the next day. So usually we'd be doing that until the evening. We'd try to get back by night because the roads are in pretty bad shape at that point down there. And we tended to be putting it together until sort of midnight, one in the morning most nights."
It was seven days of constant interviews, filming, scripting and live crosses for Claudia and her team.
"Here in Adana, rescuers are still desperately sifting through the rubble, searching for any survivors that might be trapped underneath. Ambulances are on standby to treat anyone they might find, and family members are waiting on the sidelines as well for news about their loved ones. But with three days now past, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that anyone will be found alive."
That’s something which would inevitably take a toll on a person - especially given the traumatising nature of the stories being shared.
"One that stands out was a mother we interviewed who had about 10 or 12 of her family in one tent and her son was living with severe disabilities, and their home hadn't been destroyed, but it had sustained so much damage in the earthquake that they weren't allowed back into it to collect their belongings. So all of his medications were in their apartment, and she'd been begging the authorities for days to let her in just for a few moments to get the medications. She couldn't access them any other way. She couldn't buy new ones. The services were all, for the most part down when it came to non-urgent emergency care, I guess. Speaking to her was, that was a conversation that really stood out."
But even though the Turkish people had experienced something many people would describe as their worst nightmare… Claudia says most people understood and appreciated the role of the media.
"When we first arrived, a lot of people were really, it surprised me. A lot of people were really grateful to see international media there. And when we said we were from Australia, they just thought that was ridiculous that we'd come so far. And I think there was this idea that the more media that were there and the more people telling the story, the more help they would get. But then after a few days as well, when the situation started to deteriorate and the conditions people were living in were starting to deteriorate and they could see that media presence wasn't making an immediate impact, the mood did start to shift slightly towards the media."
Claudia says she felt she didn’t deserve the public’s gratitude because she couldn’t provide the kind of immediate aid which was so needed.
"We met a man who'd spent about 90 hours under the rubble, and they'd only pulled him out a couple of days earlier, so he was still really disoriented, but he said he wanted to speak to us. So we sat and spoke with him and we asked him, what did you do? How did you stay awake? How did you keep hope that you were going to be found? And he said, for 90 hours, he just whistled because he had heard a long time ago growing up in an earthquake zone that if he gets stuck under rubble, a whistle can be heard from above. So he whistled for something like three or four days. So speaking with them, hearing their stories, but also seeing their injuries, yeah, it was something that I think will stick with me as well."
The language barrier was inevitably an issue for Claudia as she didn’t speak Turkish.
So along with herself and her cameraman, a local fixer and a driver were hired for the 10 days spent on the ground.
A fixer can be a lot of things - a translator, a navigator and simply, someone who understands the area and the people.
Claudia says there were moments with those local members of her team when the reality of the situation really stood out.
"We had asked to be taken to a rubble site in Adana, the city we were staying in to do our live cross. And our driver didn't speak any English, so our fixer Oz would sort of translate between us and our driver. And we pulled up at the rubble site and usually the four of us would get out and go together and set up and do our work. But we noticed our driver, Gian stayed in the car. So we said to Oz while we were setting up, is everything okay with Gian? And Oz told us this is the building that his uncle and cousin lived in and are missing from. And we just felt terrible to have asked to be taken to that spot and it was just really heavy once we all linked back up."
Another thing which stood out to Claudia was the psychological recovery which was so evident in Turkiye.
People were not only processing the earthquake and the loss which came with it, but aftershocks which continued to traumatise residents over and over.
So as someone coming in from the outside, without having experienced the same suffering as those surrounding her - how do you return to your life, after 10 days of seeing and hearing about so much loss?
Claudia says she managed to focus on the positives.
"I had a few days off to sort of unwind and catch up on some sleep, but then came back in and I think I was happy to be honest. I mean, I think with any story, if you get really into it, it's always hard to take yourself off it, even if you're not on the ground, if you're just into covering something or you spend a long time on one issue. But I think the best thing to do is just move on and get into something else. And so I was quite keen to come back to work. There are certainly things that stand out. Not all of them negative, some of them positive. I do think about a lot of those moments where we sat and had a cup of tea with people and some of those nicer moments on the trip. And the crew that I was traveling with there were moments that we had a lot of fun, and there was lightness in the car as well, which was really important I think."
Claudia’s keen to get back out there in the world and use what she’s learnt on more international deployments.
Despite the horrific scenes she experienced, those moments have only fueled her desire to tell stories and share authentic human moments with the world.
But for now, she says even locally, her time in Turkiye has changed the way she does her job.
"I think I'm probably a little calmer out on the road because the amount of time pressure, logistical pressure, deadline pressure we were working under over there, nothing has really compared to, and I think it just makes you a little less frazzled. But I think as well, it really did for me nail down the importance of yet treating every story with dignity. It's something obviously you try to do regardless, but having spoken to people in those really vulnerable states, you realize that really on any story, you're kind of meeting people sometimes at their worst points in their lives and the importance of treating them with dignity and respect and not just trying to get a good story out of them or a good moment for TV or a good photograph or anything like that."
You’ve been listening to History’s First Draft with me, Ciara Hain.
For more episodes exploring the effects of reporting the news on journalists, follow the podcast on the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
