On the sixth day since the earthquakes, emergency services continue to search for living people 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.
By Justin Spike, Abdelarahman Shaheen, and Suzan Frazer
Antakya, Turkey, February 11 (AP) — Despite the dearth of hoperescuers on Saturday rescued several members of the same families who survived during five days among the ruins in Turkey after a powerful earthquake that shook the border region with Syria. The death toll from the tragedy exceeded 25 thousand people.
Turkish television broadcast dramatic rescues, including that of the Narli family in central Kahramanmaras, 133 hours after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake. First 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli was saved, and then both of his parents.
That followed hours earlier the rescue of a family of five from a rubble mound in the hard-hit town of Nurdagi in Gaziantep province, the television network reported. HaberTurk. Rescuers clapped and shouted “God is great!” as the last member of the family, the father, was carried to safety.
Turkish President Recep Tayypi Erdogan, during a tour of quake-hit cities, raised the death toll in Turkey to 21,848, raising the total death toll across the region, including controlled parts of Syria. by the government and the rebels, to 25,401.
Erdogan said a disaster of this scope is rare to affect such a large area that is home to so many people. He called the tragedy the “disaster of the century” and said it had affected an area 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter that is home to 13.5 million people in Turkey and an unknown number in Syria.
“In some parts of our settlements near the fault line, we can say that almost no stone was left standing,” he said from Diyarbakir on Saturday.
Still, the day brought one amazing rescue after another, with more than a dozen survivors.
Melisa Ulku, a woman in her 20s, was rescued from the rubble in Elbistan, 132 hours after the earthquake, after the rescue of another person at the same site at the same time. Before her rescue, the police announced that people should not cheer or applaud so as not to interfere with other nearby rescue efforts. The woman was covered with a thermal blanket on a stretcher. The rescuers hugged. Some shouted “God is great!”
Just an hour earlier, a 3-year-old girl and her father were rescued from rubble in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and a 7-year-old girl was rescued shortly after in Hatay province.
The rescues offered glimmers of joy amid the devastation days after Monday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake toppled thousands of buildings, killing more than 25,000 people in the two countries, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless. home.
But not all stories had a happy ending: early on Saturday, workers reached a 13-year-old girl trapped in Hatay province and intubated her, but she died before doctors could amputate a limb and free her. of the rubble, reported the newspaper Hurriyet.
Although experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the chances of finding survivors dwindled in subzero temperatures. Rescuers began using thermal cameras to detect signs of life in the rubble, an indication of how weak those trapped might already be.
As help continued to arrive, a hundred members of the Indian Army’s medical aid team began treating the wounded at a temporary field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, where a main hospital was demolished.
One man, Sukru Canbulat, was brought to the hospital in a wheelchair, his left leg badly injured and bearing deep bruises, bruises and lacerations.
Wincing, he said he had been rescued from the collapsed apartment building in the nearby city of Antakya just hours after Monday’s quake. After receiving basic first aid, he was released without receiving adequate treatment for his injuries.
I buried (everyone I lost) and then I came here,” Canbulat said, telling his dead relatives: “My daughter is dead, my brother died, my aunt and her daughter died, and his son’s wife” who was pregnant 8 and a half months.