With hopes of finding many more survivors in the rubble fast fading, the combined death toll in Turkey and neighbouring Syria from last Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake rose above 37,000 and looked set to keep increasing with over 90,000 injured.
The UN has warned that the death toll could spiral past 55,000. Towns and cities lived in by millions have also been reduced to fragments of concrete and twisted metal.
A little girl was today rescued after spending more than a week trapped under a collapsed apartment building, as rescue crews scramble to reach her older sister who is buried amongst the rubble after earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria.
Harrowing footage shows rescue crews pulling six-year-old Miray from the rubble of her destroyed home in Turkey and carefully placing her on a stretcher as visibly emotional rescuers cheered and shouted ‘God is great’. She had spent 178 hours trapped under the rubble.
The rescue crews are now working against the clock to try and reach Miray’s older sister who is trapped underneath the same building in the southern Turkish city of Adiyaman.
Meanwhile, rescuers pulled a 13-year-old boy, identified as Kaan, out from underneath the rubble of a collapsed building in Turkey’s southern Hatay province, more than a week after the devastating earthquake struck.
The teenager held a rescuer’s hand as he was placed on a stretcher, head braced, and covered for warmth, before he was moved into an ambulance.
But reports of incredible rescues are becoming rarer as the time since the quake reaches the limits of the human body’s ability to survive without water, especially in sub-freezing temperatures.
Rescuers in Turkey are desperately digging through rubble in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras to try to reach a grandmother, mother and baby who are trapped in one room in a three-storey building, with a fourth person possibly in another room.
They said they were trying to break a wall to reach the survivors but a column was delaying them.
A soldier with the Turkish army said: “We don’t know whether they are alive. We just saw heat with the thermal cameras, but they haven’t made any sound,”
British rescuers are going to extraordinary lengths to find survivors trapped under collapsed buildings one week after earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria.
Remarkable footage shows a Briton risking his life by crawling through tunnels created in the rubble to find a trapped man in Hatay province, southern Turkey.
But the rescue phase is ‘coming to a close’, with urgency now switching to providing shelter, food, schooling and psychosocial care, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria on Monday.
Some 176 hours after the first earthquake, a woman named Serap Donmez on Monday was pulled out alive from a collapsed apartment block in Antakya by search and rescue teams from Turkey and Oman, state broadcaster TRT reported.