Istanbul authorities deployed an extensive emergency operation on 9 January to try to repair the severe damage caused by the violent storm that hit the Marmara and Aegean regions, leaving three people dead across the region and causing major damage to the city’s infrastructure and historical monuments. Strong gusts of wind, which reached up to 100 km/h, caused roofs to collapse in several districts of Istanbul: moments that were captured by security cameras and in which many residents can be seen escaping death by seconds.
In Şişli in the Paşa Mahallesi neighbourhood, the storm caused the roof of a building to fly off on Darülaceze Yolu Street, forcing traffic to stop and causing damage to several vehicles. One driver narrowly escaped being hit by the debris, a moment that was captured by a security camera, as reported by the Turkish news agency DHA.
A similar situation occurred in other parts of the city; for example in Beyoğlu, where in the Piyalepaşa neighbourhood a roof fell onto the roadway on Cemiyet Street: a neighbour who went out to observe what happened spotted pieces of another building falling off and took refuge in the building in time, averting a tragedy by just a second. Not far away, in the Keçeci Piri neighbourhood, fragments of a roof damaged parked cars, in an event also captured by cameras in the area.
Similarly, in the neighbourhoods of Mahmut Şevket Pasha (Şişli district) and Piyalepaşa (Beyoğlu district), roofs were blown off the streets by the storm in Istanbul, while in Kağıthane, in the north of the city, the wind broke the windows of a shop: a moment that was also caught on cameras, which also recorded how a satellite dish was ripped off by the wind and fell on a parked vehicle in the Keçeci Piri neighbourhood of Beyoğlu.
The storm will continue to bring heavy rain and wind gusts of up to 70 kilometres per hour on Saturday; but a sharp change in the weather is expected from Sunday onwards, according to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Disaster Coordination Centre (AKOM), which warns of a drop in temperatures of up to 10°C from Sunday afternoon due to an intense cold snap from the Balkans, which will leave night-time lows below freezing and snowfall in Istanbul from Sunday night onwards.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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