By Amberin Zaman
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 18, 1999; Page A15

IZMIT, Turkey, Aug. 17 –– The whimper was barely audible, and was growing more faint: "Save me, please, save me."

Scores of men, many using their bare hands, desperately clawed at the mountain of rubble from a five-story apartment building where Zekiye, 17, was trapped. Suddenly, wisps of her dust-covered hair were uncovered. Then, her panic-stricken face.

Amid comforting words from rescuers and onlookers, medical teams determined that Zekiye's left arm, trapped under a huge concrete slab, would have to be amputated to save her life.

It was a scene being repeated across this prosperous industrial city, which was at the epicenter of the massive earthquake that rocked western Turkey early this morning. Thousands of people were believed to have been buried, when row upon row of buildings crumpled as the earthquake struck at 3:02 a.m. this morning (8:02 p.m. EDT Monday), trapping many residents as they slept.

The number of deaths in Izmit was estimated to be in the hundreds, with thousands of people injured, doctors said.

Some of the worst damage occurred in the low-income Cumhuriyet neighborhood, where scores of people gathered around a collapsed seven-story apartment building that had housed more than 100 people. Only 15 had been pulled out alive and rushed to a nearby hospital.

"We know there are many more like her here," said Gurkan Acar, a local taxi driver pointing to the corpse of a young woman twisted beneath what must have been her bedroom ceiling and bed.

A stuffed panda, baby clothes and photographs of a young man in military uniform were scattered among the debris. A young man in a blue shirt, who was clutching a photo album, kept repeating: "If they are dead, I will kill myself. I will kill myself."

"It's his wife and two children. They're still under there," said a police officer present at the scene.

At the local state-run hospital, hundreds of wounded lay on bare, blood-covered stone floors, moaning for help. A handful of doctors gingerly picked their way through the bodies to find the most urgent cases. At least seven of the victims were dead, their bodies covered with a film of gray, pulverized concrete.

Sevim Ozkan, a 31-year-old housewife, stared listlessly at a baby girl lying beside her, its tiny head swathed in a turban of bloodied gauze. Ozkan's face was purple and bloated. The bottom half of her left leg was missing. "They cut it off," she said hoarsely and began to weep. "My children, my husband, they are all dead now. Why did Allah do this to our family?"

"We've had at least 100 people die here so far," said Ismail Hicyilmaz, the hospital's chief surgeon. "I fear there will be many more. We have no staff, no electricity, no water. Did you ever wonder what hell would be like? Well, you've stepped right into it."

Powerful aftershocks continued to shake Izmit, an city of 500,000 on the eastern shore of the Sea of Marmara, 55 miles southeast of Istanbul, throughout the day. The shocks kept the panic level high and endangered the lives of volunteers searching for survivors.

Most of the destruction occurred in low-income areas, where buildings were made of flimsy materials. Elsewhere in the city, a graceful 16th-century Ottoman mosque was seriously damaged, its cupola caved in and one of its minarets slightly askew. There was little damage to government buildings or schools.

By midday, long lines formed outside the handful of bakeries that had opened in the city center.

Thousands of people camped outdoors, hundreds of them erecting makeshift tents on the broad grassy median of Izmit's main road to protect themselves from the scorching August heat.

Others stumbled around in a state of shock, many still in their underwear.

For some, pain rapidly changed to fury at the failure of the government to send rescue teams to their neighborhoods nine hours after the quake struck.

"All those politicians do is fill their pockets. They don't care a damn about us poor folk," said Veysi Savur, a middle-aged man, who had a blood-soaked Calvin Klein T-shirt wrapped around his head.

Savur was one of the few residents to escape alive from a collapsed building in Cumhuriyet.

Describing the moment the quake struck, Savur said: "It was like Judgment Day. There was this deep and long shudder. The ceiling became the ground, the ground the ceiling. I thought I was dead."