KOS, Greece — A powerful earthquake shook beach resorts early Friday in Greece and Turkey, killing two tourists on the Greek island of Kos and injuring nearly 500 others across the Aegean Sea region.
The tourists were crushed when a building collapsed on a bar.
Only a few miles apart, Kos and the Turkish resort of Bodrum were hit hours before dawn by a shallow undersea quake that caused a two-foot sea swell and havoc among residents and thousands of vacationers.
The U.S. Geological survey measured the quake as being magnitude 6.7, with Greek and Turkish estimates a fraction lower.
“It was shocking, terrifying,” Kos resident Vassilis Megas said. “The whole house shook back and forth. People ran out into streets. We did too, and stayed out all night.”
Two men — from Turkey and Sweden — were killed when a collapsing wall smashed into the White Corner Club, a popular bar in the Old Town area of Kos. Several others were seriously injured and airlifted to larger hospitals in Greece — one person had to have a leg amputated and another had life-threatening head injuries, doctors said. Hundreds of revelers were in the White Corner Club at the time.
The quake came in the midst of Greece and Turkey’s vital summer tourism season.
Many of the injuries occurred when tourists and residents scrambled out of buildings and even leapt from balconies. Most of injuries occurred in Turkey, in Bodrum and other beach resorts, as people fled from buildings and as the sea swell flung cars off the road and pushed boats ashore.
Seismologists said the shallow depth of the quake was to blame for the damage and the sea swell that scattered cars, boats, and trash bins across shores in the east Aegean Sea.
“For the strength of this earthquake, followed by so many aftershocks, the damage was actually quite limited. Most people have been cleared to return home,” said Greek seismologist Efthymios Lekkas, who led a government inspection team on Kos.
Damage in Kos included churches, an old mosque, the port’s 14th-century castle and other old buildings in the town.
“There are not many old buildings left on Kos. Nearly all the structures on the island have been built under the new codes to withstand earthquakes,” Kos Mayor Giorgos Kyritsis said, noting that a deadly quake in 1933 had flattened the island’s main town.
