The Turkish agency for disaster management, AFAD, has confirmed that more than 90,000 people have been evacuated from the 10 Turkish provinces affected by the earthquake and there are now more than 166,000 rescue teams and volunteers on the ground, including about 8 thousand foreign rescue specialists.
Madrid, February 11 (Europa Press).– The devastating earthquakes this week in Turkey and Syria have already claimed the lives of more than 24 thousand 500 people while the international community continues with its relief efforts and rescue teams they make a final effort to continue finding survivors, five days after the earthquakes.
According to the last official balance of this Saturday, at least 21,043 people have died in Turkey alone, where the number of injured is 80 thousand 097 people. In neighboring Syria, there is evidence of 3,553 deaths and 5,276 injuries, for a total of 24,596 deaths.
The Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited the city of Diyarbakir this Saturday from where he stressed that the current earthquake “is three times bigger and three times more destructive than the one in 1999, which was so far the biggest disaster in history of our country”, according to the official Turkish news agency Anatolia. In 1999, some 18,000 deaths were recorded in the Istanbul area.
It has been Erdogan himself who has provided the latest official balance of fatalities. In addition, he has highlighted that 160,000 troops have been mobilized in the ten affected provinces, to which are added the teams sent from abroad.
“We have mobilized all the state media. Trust us, believe us. We are not going to leave our citizens on the street experiencing difficulties and poverty. We are planning the reconstruction of hundreds of thousands of houses and the reconstruction of our cities, ”he stressed. Erdogan has also announced that until the end of the current academic year the universities will continue with classes online.
The Turkish agency for disaster management, AFAD, has confirmed that more than 90,000 people have been evacuated from the 10 Turkish provinces affected by the earthquake and there are now more than 166,000 rescue teams and volunteers on the ground, including about 8 thousand foreign rescue specialists.
In the last few hours, the Turkish emergency services have managed to get a 70-year-old woman and another 55-year-old woman alive about 122 hours after being buried under the rubble of two destroyed buildings in the cities of Kahramanmaras and Diyarbakir, all this after the earthquakes registered on Monday in the south of the country, near the border with Syria.
Following an intense effort by Turkish search teams in the city of Kahramanmaras, 70-year-old Violet Tabak has been rescued from the ruins of a building located in the Onikisubat district after being trapped for 112 hours, before being transferred to a hospital for medical attention, the Turkish state news agency, Anatolia, has reported.
At the same time but 400 kilometers to the east, in the city of Diyarbakir, a 55-year-old woman was being pulled out from under the rubble of the destroyed building in which she had spent more than five days locked up.
The rescue work carried out for hours by the AFAD and other Turkish emergency services has led them to rescue five people in the last hours, including a two-month-old baby.
On the sixth day since the earthquakes, the emergency services continue to search for people alive to rescue, a task that becomes more difficult with each passing hour, since the standard time that a human being can remain without the intake of water or food in disasters like this it is 72 hours.
However, countries such as Germany and Austria have announced the suspension of rescue work in the Turkish province of Hatay, the most affected by the earthquakes, due to an increase in threats to the safety of its members, either due to the growing tension of the local population due to the slow arrival of aid or due to sporadic clashes between armed groups.
Although the Army does not identify these groups, the province has been the occasional scene of clashes between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrillas, which have been at war with Ankara for decades.