Rescuers dig to save family in Turkey after earthquake

Rescuers are frantically digging through the rubble to reach the last of the survivors.

Antakya/Elbistan, Turkey:

Rescuers in Turkey pulled scores of people alive from collapsed buildings on Monday and were digging to reach a grandmother, mother and daughter of a family a week after the country’s worst earthquake in modern history.

With hopes of finding many more survivors in the fast-evaporating rubble, the combined official death toll from last Monday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Turkey and neighboring Syria has risen to nearly 36,000 and continues to rise.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria on Monday that the rescue phase was “coming to a close”, switching to providing immediate shelter, food, schooling and psychological care.

State broadcaster TRT reported that about 176 hours after the first earthquake, a woman named Serap Donmez was pulled alive from a collapsed apartment block in Antakya by search and rescue teams from Turkey and Oman.

Another woman was rescued in southern Gaziantep province hours earlier, CNN Turk reports. Officials said a 35-year-old man was rescued from the rubble of a building in the city of Adiyaman.

Rescue workers in Kahramanmaras said they had contact with a grandmother, mother and child trapped in one room of the three-story building, while a fourth person was possibly in another room. They said they were trying to breach a wall to reach survivors but a column was delaying them.

Members of a Spanish rescue team, Turkish military and police search teams were working in the building, which was largely intact.

A Turkish army soldier told Reuters: “We don’t know if they are alive or not. We only saw heat from thermal cameras, but they didn’t make any sound.”

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said 31,643 people have died in the deadliest earthquake in Turkey since 1939. A UN agency said that as of Sunday, more than 4,300 people were reported killed and 7,600 wounded in northwestern Syria.

The earthquake is now the sixth deadliest natural disaster of this century after the 2005 earthquake that killed at least 73,000 people in Pakistan.

syria aid

In Syria, the disaster hit hardest in the rebel-held northwest, again rendering homeless many people who had already been displaced several times before by a decade-long civil war. The sector has received very little aid as compared to the government-held areas.

The UN’s Griffiths said, “What’s most amazing here is that even in Aleppo, which has suffered so much over the years, this moment, that moment … was the worst these people had experienced.”

The people of the region have “failed”, he said in an earlier Twitter post.

Currently only one crossing on the Turkey-Syria border is open for UN aid supplies. Griffiths said the UN would receive assistance moving from government-held areas in Syria to the rebel-held northwest.

The United States calls on the Syrian government and all parties to provide immediate humanitarian assistance to all in need.

A UN spokesman said earthquake aid from government-held areas in the region controlled by hardline opposition groups has been stalled by approval issues with the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which controls the region. Is.

An HTS source in Idlib told Reuters the group would not allow any shipments from government-held areas and that aid would come from Turkey in the north.

The UN has said it is hoping to open an additional two border points.

security concerns

Residents and aid workers in several Turkish cities have cited deteriorating security conditions, with widespread accounts of businesses looted and collapsed homes.

In southern Turkey’s Antakya, one of the worst-affected cities, business owners emptied their shops on Sunday to prevent looters from stealing goods.

Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said over the weekend that rabies and tetanus vaccines had been sent to the quake zone and that mobile pharmacies had begun operating there, amid concerns about sanitation and the spread of infection in the area.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said the government will deal firmly with looters, as he faces questions over his response to the earthquake ahead of elections in June that are expected to be his toughest in his two decades in power. hopefully.

Turkey said on Sunday some 80,000 people were in hospital and more than one million were in temporary shelters.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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