Alper Erken, who escaped a fire disaster with his family by lowering bedsheets, recounts the experience: 'Just as it was my turn, the bedsheet tore in half...'

Seventy-eight people lost their lives in a terrible fire at the Grand Kartal Hotel in Bolu's Kartalkaya Ski Center. As part of the investigation into the disaster, 15 people, including hotel owner Halit Ergül, were arrested.

After the fire disaster, images of sheets hanging from the hotel's windows broke hearts. Alper Erken, who survived the fire with his wife, child and others by using sheets lowered from the window, described what happened.

Erken, 49, said he had gone to the hotel with his wife and children for the semester break and that they had preferred the same hotel for three years.

Explaining that he is a light sleeper and woke up to sounds coming from inside the hotel, Erken said he heard people shouting, "Where did this fire come from? Come on, let's get out quickly."

Erken said: "A panic atmosphere formed. Although we were on the eighth floor, one of the upper floors, our room was exactly a corner room. In other words, we had windows both on the side facing the cliff and on the side facing sideways. When I looked out the window, I saw the fire. The fire was coming upward."

Erken said he immediately woke his wife and child and told them to get dressed: "We could not understand that the fire was this big. Still, we acted very quickly. When we opened the door, smoke had slowly begun to come into the room. We opened the windows immediately. We wanted to open the window in the corridor, but it was locked. At that moment, people coming from other rooms said, 'Oh no, we are going to die here, this gas will choke us all.' There was no fire yet, only very serious smoke was coming in."

Erken said they broke the corridor window with the coffee tables they found and continued:

"Then people from the other rooms crowded into our room and gathered at the side-facing window. We said, 'Let's go down from here by tying duvet covers together.' Then, as the men, we said, 'The duvet cover may tear while going down; we need to soften the landing, let's take out the mattresses.' The mattresses were double mattresses, they would not come out, the window was small. We pushed them diagonally and straight, and with kicks and punches we threw two mattresses down. We also called out to the people below. We are on the eighth floor, but the building next to us is a 4-5-storey building with a roof, and that saved us. If there had been no sheets, we would have jumped, because that was better than dying there by suffocation. We made these decisions in 3-5 minutes."

"IT WAS A VERY BAD ENVIRONMENT"

Erken explained that he opened the door when the fire first started, then the electricity went out, and after that they had no chance of opening the door from outside because the doors were electric.

Stating that there was no warning during the fire, Erken said: "There was no one waking us up... There were no sprinklers in the rooms. There was no external fire escape. There was an internal fire escape, a reinforced-concrete staircase. But an enormous amount of gas was coming from there. Those places had become like chimneys. The doors were leaking; tremendous smoke was coming from the internal fire escape door. It was also coming from the other rooms, but mostly from the elevator side. It was a very bad environment."

Erken said they kept telling one another not to panic under any circumstances: "Among ourselves, we said, 'First we will lower the children, then the women, and finally the men with the sheet.' Among 12-13 people, only one woman, I think because of nerves, lost strength in her hands, could not hold the duvet cover, fell and was injured. Immediately afterward, her husband, who is a doctor, went down and gave first aid. Then 2-3 of us went down with a steel ladder that arrived. Just when it was my turn, the duvet cover tore in the middle. I said, 'It doesn't matter, I will go down as far as the torn part and jump from there.' But they brought the ladder in time. May God bless whoever brought it."

Erken said they descended to the ground from the neighboring building and then drove his wife and child to another nearby hotel. He continued:

"After making sure they were safe, I ran back to the hotel to help. Unfortunately, there was a very bad scene. People who were not as lucky as us, caught by the fire on the upper floors, had climbed halfway out of the windows with children in their arms. A tremendous gas was coming out. During the evacuation, we wet towels and put them over people's mouths. We wet their large towels and placed them under the door so the gas would not come in.

Everyone there thought of something. Some tied knots, some let down the rope, some pushed the mattress; everyone did something. The fact that there were men there and that we stayed calm bought us very important time. When we got down, there was only one gendarmerie team. The fire brigade came 1-2 hours later. In those 20-30 minutes at the hotel, the gas had killed those people. When I arrived, people were screaming and crying. Then those voices stopped. Fire crews arrived piece by piece. The first arrivals were only spraying water. When the fire truck with the high ladder arrived, they brought down only a very limited number of people from below or from the sides. Meanwhile, there were people who jumped. At least 2-3 people died before my eyes. Even though we said, 'Don't jump, look, the fire brigade is coming,' they jumped in that panic and died."

"GOD SAVED US"

Erken said he had encountered something like this for the first time in his life and that they would file a complaint against the business and lodge a criminal complaint.

Erken said: "We heard no fire alarm, saw no fire guidance light, no fire escape and no fire brigade arriving very quickly. I think God saved us; we still had life to live. If our room had been in the front, in the middle, we would not be here now. Because you are on the eighth floor, trapped; where can you escape? Either you die inside or you throw yourself out. And people did that."

Erken said that when he later looked at photographs of the hotel, he realized they had descended from the eighth floor to the fifth floor: "As a father, I feared most for my wife and child. My son went down first; I saw him go down. At that moment we lowered everyone. When I lowered my wife, I felt an incredible lightness. I said, 'I could fly from here now, I am that light.' But there was no need; somehow God helped and we survived."