Turkish emergency teams this morning managed to rescue a Syrian mother and her two-year-old daughter 44 hours after they were buried under the rubble of a destroyed building in southern Turkey.
Search and rescue teams heard cries for help in the remains of one of many destroyed buildings in the town of Kahramanmaras, close to the Syrian border, according to the Turkish state news agency Anatolia.
After carefully clearing the rubble, teams reached Imed Sabha, a 33-year-old Syrian mother, and her daughter Vafe, who were taken to an ambulance on a stretcher and then taken to a nearby hospital.
Hours earlier, firefighters from the Turkish town of Kayseri in another district of Kahramanmaras had rescued Emin, a six-year-old child, alive from the rubble of a building.
Firefighters rescue little boy Emin, who was trapped under rubble in Türkiye’s southern Kahramanmaras province https://t.co/AlJD0ttmJr pic.twitter.com/HeROKVirP6
– ANADOLU AGENCY (@anadoluagency) February 7, 2023
The death toll from the massive earthquakes that hit southeastern Turkey and neighboring Syria on Monday has risen to more than 7,800, according to the latest preliminary toll released by authorities.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority indicated that about 60,200 members of the search and rescue teams, including foreign experts and non-governmental organizations, are working on search and rescue missions and clearing debris, under a device more than 100 planes and helicopters highlighted.
The first foreign rescue teams arrived on Tuesday. The European Union (EU) has sent 1,185 rescue teams and 79 sniffer dogs to Turkey from 19 member states, including France, Germany and Greece.
Also on Tuesday, Venezuela’s government sent 50 “technical specialists, doctors, specialists in disaster relief, people identification and tracing” to Turkey and Syria, Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos said.
Bad weather hampers rescue operations and makes the situation even more difficult for some survivors, who suffer from the cold and have to resort to makeshift fireplaces.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that 23 million people “may be exposed, including about five million vulnerable people”, having already said it fears “balances eight times greater than initial figures”.
The earthquake also caused the collapse of a total of 5,775 buildings, according to authorities.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already declared a three-month state of emergency in the ten affected provinces on Monday, underlining that these earthquakes are the country’s worst natural disaster since the 1939 Erzincan earthquake in eastern Turkey. ., which caused more than 32,000 deaths.
Source: DN
