Izmit

The blast at a grain depot at the port of Derince on the northern shore of the Gulf of Izmit sent up plumes of thick smoke and dust.

Some even point to government malfeasance after a 1999 earthquake in northwestern Turkey near the city of Izmit that killed about 18,000 people, saying that taxes imposed from that disaster were misspent and worsened the effects of this year’s quake.

The political party founded by Erdogan in 2001 came to power amid an economic crisis and the Izmit quake.

In 1999, Turkey was hit by a devastating earthquake in the northwestern city of Izmit that killed more than 17,000 people and damaged around 20,000 buildings.

The most recent large quakes in that sequence were the magnitude 7.6 Izmit earthquake of August 1999, which struck east of Istanbul and resulted in an estimated 17,000 deaths.