Frightened foreign and Greek tourists on the Greek island of Kos have described the moment an earthquake struck as “something out of a film”.
The 6.5-magnitude quake, which has killed at least two people and injured up to 200 more, rattled Turkey’s Aegean coast as well, but Kos was nearest to the epicenter and appeared to be the worst-hit.
Kostas Alexiou, a Dj at a bar took to Facebook to inform his loved one that he was OK when the earthquake struck, also expressing his sorrow that a shop he had worked for 18 years had been completely destroyed. “I am well, shocked but well … … This happened, however, and it really finished us…Most of us miraculously survived… 18 years in this shop … a whole lifetime … I feel for the souls unjustly lost….. unfortunately all it needs is a moment and your life completely changes… a pity … a real pity !!!!’, he wrote. Kostas Alexiou Dj’d for the bar that collapsed and led to the deaths of two tourists, a Turk and a Swede.
A frequent at the bar “White Corner”. Nikos Karagiannidis said he was next to the Dj. “My daughter used to work at the bar and I am very friendly with the owner. I was there last night, sitting next to the Dj. At one point I left and went to the shop across the street to find my wife. We barely exchanged a couple of words when the whole island started shaming”, he told Protothema.gr. He continues by describing how everyone was scrambling to her out of the bar. “Bottles were flying out of the bar. Going outside I saw one side of White Corner completely collapsed. There were two dead under the bricks and debris. They were sitting on some stools outside the bar and were squashed when the wall came crashing down on them. About half a metre away there were seriously injured people”, he says in shock, adding: “Both doors of the shop were open, and within a minute it was empty. That was it. What had happened was over. Some tourists who had never seen such a thing were in a state of shock.” Mr. Karagannidis said himself and others tried to pull out the two unlucky tourists from under the rubble but were unable to. “We pulled out the man who lost his legs. The ambulance services did not delay to show up. The island’s doctors deserve congratulations, without them there could be more dead people. They first took the seriously injured, with their legs cut and broken, and then they returned and took the dead. ”
British holidaymakers in the popular tourist spot were left stranded outside their hotel after the powerful tremor sent tourists streaming from their hotels around 1.30am local time.
Lauren Duffy, a 20-year-old student from Merseyside, was evacuated to Lambi Beach along with her mother and sister from the Atlantis Hotel, which was strewn with shattered glass.
She said: “We were asleep in our hotel room when we were woken by really violent shaking, and we all were screaming and told to evacuate from the hotel.”
She said they were able to return to the hotel just long enough to retrieve their passports before they were forced out again by tremors.
Ms Duffy said no one was hurt but the broken glass made the area unsafe. She said most of the stranded tourists there were Dutch, Russian and German.
Kos’s “old town” area, full of bars and other night-time entertainment, was littered with fallen bricks and other debris. The island’s hotels had broken glass and other damage, leaving hundreds of tourists to spend the rest of the night outdoors, resting on beach loungers with blankets provided by staff.
“The instant reaction was to get ourselves out of the room,” said Christopher Hackland, of Edinburgh, who is a scuba instructor on Kos. “There was banging. There was shaking. The light was swinging, banging on the ceiling, crockery falling out of the cupboards, and pans …”
“There was a lot of screaming and crying and hysterics coming from the hotel,” he said, referring to the hotel next to his apartment building. “It felt like being at a theme park with one of the illusions, an optical illusion where you feel like you’re upside down.”
Naomi Ruddock, who is on holiday in Kos with her mother Eleanor, said she felt like she was on a boat in choppy water when the earthquake hit.
The 22-year-old, who is due to graduate from Brighton University next week, said they were woken from their sleep when the room shook.
She said: “We were asleep and we just felt the room shaking. The room moved. Literally everything was moving. And it kind of felt like you were on a boat and it was swaying really fast from side to side, you felt seasick.”
The pair ran from their ground floor room in the Akti Palace Hotel in Kardamena, around a 30-minute drive from Kos Town .
Ms Ruddock, from London, added: “The restaurant manager just said that he’s never seen anything like this ever happen ever around this area or ever in Greece. He said it was like something out of a film, and it was.”
source: telegraph.co.uk
