103 hours after the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, a mother and child were pulled out of the rubble.
The death toll from Friday’s 7.8 earthquake rose to 21,642, including 18,342 in Turkey and more than 3,300 in Syria.
This number exceeds the 17,000 deaths of the 1999 earthquake in northwestern Turkey and is the worst disaster since 1939, when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed more than 30,000 people in Erzincan, in the country’s east.
On Friday, rescuers were still at the scene of the disaster, but since the affected area covers an area equivalent to London and Paris, they reportedly had to choose who to rescue.
A Associated Press A journalist in Adiyaman, in southeastern Turkey, saw someone begging rescuers to look through the rubble of a building in which family members were stranded. They refused, saying there were no survivors, and prioritized areas with possible survivors.
The man, who identified himself as Ahmet out of fear of government retribution, later asked, “How can I go home and sleep? My brother is there. Maybe he’s still alive.”
Rescuers in Kahramanmarash, near the epicenter, went “frantic” as hopes of finding survivors faded, Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said.
Describing the scene, he said that rescuers were “digging through the rubble in the hope of finding people alive or dead, because more than 96 hours have passed and hope is fading here.”
A teenager rescued after 94 hours under rubble in Gaziantep, Turkey, said he was forced to drink his own urine.
Adnan Mohammed Korkut, 17, smiled as crowds of family and friends chanted his name and wept with joy as he was dragged out.
“Thank God you’re here,” he said, hugging his mother and others who leaned in to kiss and hug him as he was loaded into the ambulance.
Elsewhere, footage in Diyarbakır, Turkey, showed a mother and her son being rescued from the rubble 103 hours later.
Hundreds of thousands were left homeless in the middle of winter, and many people were left homeless.
Mustafa Turan from Adiyaman reported that 15 of his relatives were killed. Dozens of people were sleeping on the street or in tents.
“At about 4 a.m. at night it got so cold that our drinking water froze,” he says.
Engineers have speculated that the extent of the destruction is partly due to poor enforcement of building codes, which some have warned for years would make it vulnerable to earthquakes.
The problem has been largely ignored, experts say, because fixing it would be costly and unpopular and hinder the country’s economic growth.
Additional agency reporting
Source: I News
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