Race against time to find survivors of earthquake which has killed 5,000
Rescuers are using their bare hands to search for survivors from the devastating earthquake which has now killed 5,000 people in Turkey and Syria.
The magnitude 7.8 quake toppled entire apartment blocks, wrecked hospitals, and left thousands of people injured or homeless in the winter cold.
Time is now running out to save families still unaccounted for after their homes collapsed on top of them while they slept.
Temperatures fell close to freezing overnight, hampering the rescue efforts and worsening conditions for those yet to be rescued.
Search teams have been dispatched from all over the world to help with the rescue efforts, but a day after the earthquake struck the number of emergency crews on the ground remained few.
They include structural engineers, soldiers, paramedics and handlers with trained search dogs.
But their efforts have been impeded by around 200 aftershocks, which has made checking though unstable structures perilous.
The medical aid organisation Doctors Without Borders confirmed one of its staff members was killed when his house in Syria’s Idlib province collapsed. Others lost family members.
Nurgul Atay said she could hear her mother’s voice beneath the rubble of a collapsed building in the city of Antakya, the capital of Hatay province.
But without the help of rescue crew or heavy equipment, their efforts to save her have been futile.
‘If only we could lift the concrete slab we’d be able to reach her,’ she said. ‘My mother is 70-years-old, she won’t be able to withstand this for long.’
Across Hatay province, just southwest of the earthquake’s epicenter, officials say as many as 1,500 buildings were destroyed and many people reported relatives being trapped under the rubble with no aid or rescue teams arriving.
Another resident, who gave his name as Deniz, said: ‘They’re making noises but nobody is coming.
‘We’re devastated, we’re devastated. My God … They’re calling out. They’re saying, “Save us”, but we can’t save them.
‘How are we going to save them? There has been nobody since the morning.’
In Kahramanmaras, north of Hatay, entire families gathered around fires and wrapped themselves in blankets to stay warm.
‘We barely made it out of the house,’ said Neset Guler, huddled around the fire with his four children.
‘Our situation is a disaster. We are hungry, we are thirsty. It’s miserable.’
The earthquake, which was followed by a series of aftershocks, was the biggest recorded worldwide by the US Geological Survey since a tremor in the remote South Atlantic in August 2021.
It was the deadliest earthquake in Turkey since a quake of similar magnitude in 1999 that killed more than 17,000.
The death toll has climbed to at least 3,381, according to the Anadolu news agency, citing the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority.
At least 1,602 people were killed in Syria and about 3,500 injured, according to figures from the Damascus government and rescue workers in the northwestern region controlled by insurgents.
Poor internet connections and damaged roads between some of the worst-hit cities in Turkey’s south, homes to millions of people, hindered efforts to assess and address the impact.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, preparing for a tough election in May, called the quake a historic disaster and said authorities were doing all they could.
‘Everyone is putting their heart and soul into efforts although the winter season, cold weather and the earthquake happening during the night makes things more difficult,’ he said.
He said 45 countries had offered to help the search and rescue efforts.
In the Turkish city of Iskenderun, rescuers climbed an enormous pile of debris that was once part of a state hospital’s intensive care unit in search of survivors.
Health workers did what they could to tend to the new rush of injured patients.
‘We have a patient who was taken into surgery but we don’t know what happened,’ said Tulin, a woman in her 30s, standing outside the hospital, wiping away tears and praying.
In Syria, the effects of the quake were compounded by the destruction of more than 11 years of civil war.
A top UN humanitarian official said fuel shortages and the harsh winter weather were also creating obstacles to its response.
‘The infrastructure is damaged, the roads that we used to use for humanitarian work are damaged, we have to be creative in how to get to the people … but we are working hard,’ UN resident coordinator El-Mostafa Benlamlih told Reuters in an interview via video link from Damascus.
In the government-controlled city of Aleppo, footage on Twitter showed two neighbouring buildings collapsing one after the other, filling streets with billowing dust.
Two residents of the city, which has been heavily damaged in the war, said the buildings had fallen in the hours after the quake, which was felt as far away as Cyprus and Lebanon.
Raed al-Saleh of the Syrian White Helmets, a rescue service in rebel-held territory known for pulling people from the ruins of buildings destroyed by air strikes, said they were in ‘a race against time to save the lives of those under the rubble’.
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