Floods have killed at least 29 people in and around Istanbul after the worst rainfall in 80 years hit Turkey’s biggest city, turning roads to rivers, swamping residential streets and sweeping away cars in two days of downpours.
Television footage showed families huddled on the roofs of half-submerged buses, people climbing from the windows of floating cars, and rescuers helping those stranded to safety over ladders or crouched in the teeth of bulldozers.
A statement on the prime minister’s website said 24 people had died in Istanbul and five in the Tekirdag area, on the northern coast of the Sea of Marmara, while two remained missing. It listed schools, hospitals and thousands of residential and office buildings as affected by the floods in an initial assessment of the damage.
Muammer Guler, Istanbul’s governor, confirmed that the casualties included seven women killed in a minibus on their way to work at a textile factory.
Istanbul’s historical centre and financial district were largely unaffected, as were the city’s airports. The worst of the damage is in low-lying western areas on Istanbul’s European side, which have been built in the past few decades.
That fact could raise questions about the cost of rapid urban development, even though Tuesday night’s conditions were exceptional, with some areas receiving six month’s rainfall in a matter of hours. More rainfall is forecast over the coming days.
Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was due to arrive in Istanbul on Wednesday evening, has ordered emergency payments of TL2bn ($1.3bn, €916m, £807m) to Istanbul and TL250,000 to Tekirdag.
Ali Erlat, deputy general manager of the insurer Axa Sigorta, told the state-run Anatolian news agency the costs of flood damage could reach $70m to $80m (€48m-€55m, £42m-£48m).
Sezai Saklaroglu, an analyst at Ata Invest, said about 30 per cent of residential property in the Marmara region had insurance likely to cover flood damage, adding that estimates of damage also included small businesses and some farmland.
Among the businesses affected is Vodafone’s Turkish arm, which on Wednesday warned some services could be disrupted after one of its exchanges was flooded.
Cities further east on Turkey’s Black Sea coast often experience floods and suffered badly earlier this summer in a year of high rainfall, but Istanbul’s population of 10m is more used to worrying about the risk of earthquakes.
