Tornado kills four construction workers in Antalya
Two site containers torn apart with five men inside in Turkey's tornado-prone south, yellow-level rain warning preceded a twister that threw one container 300 metres onto a school roof
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Four construction workers were killed when a tornado tore apart two site containers in Kepez, a district of Antalya on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. A fifth worker survived with minor injuries, and a crane at the same construction site collapsed.
Governor Hulusi Şahin said the tornado lifted the two containers with five workers inside, throwing them apart. Two died at the scene, two more after being taken to hospitals. Local outlet Antalya Bilgileri reported that one of the containers was hurled some 300 metres through the air before landing on a school roof. Officials described the destruction as highly localized — nearby buildings were untouched, and no storms were reported elsewhere in the city. The national weather service had issued only a yellow-level warning, its lowest tier, for heavy rain in the area.
The dead were workers who slept and worked in shipping containers on an open building site — the people at the bottom of every construction contract. Antalya's southern coastline is among the country's most tornado-prone areas, and tornadoes are common along Turkey's Mediterranean and Aegean coasts in autumn and winter. The weather risk was known; the containers were there anyway.
The crane collapsed, the containers flew, and the workers died.