After the devastating earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria in early February, residents of the seismically active Central Asian republics express concerns about their own safety. Klara Imangalieva, who lives on the ninth floor of a high-rise in in Kazakhstan's second largest city, Almaty, says she started looking for "a single-storey house" to move into and "at least have a chance of surviving" if an earthquake were to strike. Almaty, which has a population of around 2 million people, sits in a high seismic hazard zone in southeastern Kazakhstan. Nursaren Uzbekov, the deputy head of Almaty's Institure of Seismology, explains that, from 2018 to 2022, around "40,000 seismic events" took place, "but most of them were light, they were only registered by seismic sensors". In terms of "perceptible earthquakes that the population feels on our territory, from nine to 15 seismic events occur annually" he adds. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES