Emergency services spent about 116 hours rescuing four people buried under rubble in several cities in Turkey following the earthquakes recorded on Monday.
Using thermographic cameras and listening devices, a search and rescue team of volunteers has found a woman under the ruins of a building in the southern city of Antioquia, Turkey’s state news agency Anatolia said.
After hours of work, Turkish emergency services, with the help of volunteers and staff from non-governmental organizations, managed to open a corridor to extract the woman, who was later transferred to a nearby medical center.
In the city of Kahramanmaras (southeast), close to the epicenter of the earthquakes, an Israeli search and rescue team managed to save Ridvan Cakiroglu, eight years old, who was taken to hospital by ambulance.
Just two hours earlier, two people, one of whom was disabled, according to Anatolia, had been rescued from the ruins of an apartment building in the city of Gaziantep (southern center).
The rescue team consisted of agents of the Turkish security forces and a group of miners, who after three hours of work managed to reach the survivors, who were later taken to a hospital.
The Emergency and Disaster Management Authority, under Turkey’s Interior Ministry, said about 160,000 members of search and rescue teams – including international teams and NGOs – are working in the affected areas.
The Portuguese team sent to Turkey is already carrying out search and rescue missions after the country’s recorded earthquake, Interior Minister José Luís Carneiro said on Friday.
A team of 53 members of civil defence, the GNR and the emergency medical service left for Turkey on Wednesday with search and rescue equipment to support search and rescue efforts.
The mission is expected to last 10 to 15 days, but could be extended depending on what the team finds on the ground and depending on Portuguese foreign policy, the president of the National Authority for Emergencies and Civil Protection said this week.
The balance rises to more than 24,000 dead
More than 24,000 people have died as a result of the violent earthquake that hit southern Turkey and Syria on Monday, according to official figures released on Saturday.
According to Afad, a Turkish aid agency, 20,665 bodies have been recovered from the rubble in Turkey so far and 3,553 bodies have been counted in Syria, according to an official balance sheet.
These figures bring the total number of deaths in the two countries to 24,218 from a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, which was followed by several aftershocks, one of which measured 7.5.
Hopes of finding more survivors are dwindling by the minute and rescue work has already halted in some areas as teams begin clearing debris.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, announced this Saturday a special donation of $25 million (€23.3 million) to bolster aid efforts in Syria.
The funds, which come from the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund, will seek to meet the most urgent needs of the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the earthquakes, the UN said in a statement.
Griffiths is in Gaziantep, in southern Turkey, and will travel to Aleppo, in northwestern Syria, on Sunday.
The Syrian government announced on Friday that it will accept international aid sent to rebel-held areas from areas under their control.
Source: DN
