Rescue teams continue operations to find earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria, with some successful but notable cases, such as a girl who had her arm amputated in order to be released.
Monday’s quake hit an area that is home to 13.5 million people in Turkey and an unknown number in Syria and stretches beyond the distance between London and Paris or Boston and Philadelphia.
Even with an “army” of people participating in the rescue efforts, the teams had to choose where to help, reports the Associated Press (AP).
Turkish authorities say more than 110,000 rescue teams are taking part in the efforts, with more than 5,500 vehicles, with 95 countries offering help.
Aerial images show the extent of the devastation, with entire high-rise neighborhoods reduced to twisted metal, shotcrete and exposed power lines.
The Turkish news agency DHA reported the rescue of a 10-year-old girl in Antakya, where doctors had to amputate her arm to free her, in a tragedy that had already victimized her parents and three siblings.
A 17-year-old girl made it out alive in Adiyaman and a 20-year-old girl was found in Kahramanmaras by rescuers who shouted “God is great,” the DHA reported.
In Adiyaman, AP journalists saw someone begging rescuers to check the rubble of a building where family members were allegedly trapped, to which the latter refused, arguing that no one was alive there and that they had to prioritize areas with possible survivors.
More than 20,000 people died as a result of the violent earthquake that shook southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on Monday, according to official figures released Thursday night.
According to AFAD, the Turkish relief agency, 17,134 bodies have been extracted from the rubble in Turkey so far and 3,317 bodies have been recovered in Syria, according to the latest official counts and medical professionals.
The tragedy dwarfs the more than 18,400 people who died in Japan’s Fukushima earthquake in 2011, which triggered a tsunami, and the 18,000 people estimated to have died in an earthquake near the Turkish capital Istanbul in 1999.
This new number will undoubtedly increase in the days to come, and tens of thousands will also be injured.
While experts say people can survive for a week or more, the chances of finding survivors in sub-zero temperatures are dwindling.
Gradually, the rush of rescuers and family members going through rubble, sometimes resulting in rescues, begins to focus on demolition of dangerously unstable structures.
It is not possible to know how many people are still missing in both countries.
In Nurdagi, a city of about 40,000 people nestled among snow-capped mountains about 56 kilometers (35 miles) from the quake’s epicenter, vast areas of the city were flattened, with almost no buildings intact as even those that did not collapse suffered heavy damage. . , making them unsafe.
In Kahramanmaras, the closest town to the epicenter, a sports arena the size of a basketball court served as a makeshift mortuary to accommodate and identify bodies.
Workers continued rescue operations in that city on Thursday, but it became clear that many of those trapped in the collapsed buildings had already died.
One of the rescuers said his psychological state was worsening and the smell of death was becoming unbearable, the AP says.
In northwestern Syria, the first UN aid trucks since the earthquake have arrived to enter rebel-held Turkey, underscoring the difficulty of getting help for those living in those parts of the country that have been at civil war for more than a year. decade.
Source: TSF
