The key facts

  • Four construction workers killed, one injured: two died at the scene, two in hospital
  • The tornado hurled two residential containers into the air and toppled a tower crane; the crane's fall caused no casualties
  • In Istanbul, streets were flooded in Pendik and Tuzla, and the D-100 highway was closed

Four killed at a construction site in Antalya

Late Monday evening, a sudden tornado struck a construction site in the Kepez district of Antalya in southern Turkey. According to the governor's office, four construction workers were killed and one more was injured: two died at the scene and two died in hospital. Wind gusts hurled two workers' residential containers into the air and toppled a tower crane — the crane's fall, as euronews reports, caused no casualties.

“An extremely localized phenomenon”

Antalya Governor Hulusi Şahin described the tornado as “an extremely localized phenomenon”: no such weather was reported anywhere else in the city. This underscores how sudden the event was — the disaster affected only a single construction site, where workers were in residential containers.

The same system — flooding in Istanbul

The same weather system brought torrential rain to Istanbul: streets were flooded in the Pendik and Tuzla districts, and the D-100 highway was closed. Passersby rescued a father and daughter who were trapped in a car on the flooded Kaynarca underpass. The flooding came just 12 days after record rainfall in the Istanbul area on October 14, which claimed the lives of eight people — meaning that in less than two weeks this is already the second deadly episode linked to extreme precipitation in Turkey's megacities.