The teams coming from Zonguldak Province succeeded in rescuing Halima Gurbuz 124.5 hours after the earthquake, in the Batal Gazi district of Malatya Province, and after removing her from under the rubble, the elderly woman was taken to the hospital.
Pictures published by the official Anadolu news agency also showed that two women were pulled out alive from under the rubble after they were trapped for 122 hours in the aftermath of the most devastating earthquake in the region in two decades.
The pictures showed one of the two rescued women, Menix Tabak, 70, wrapped in a blanket, while rescuers took her to an ambulance waiting in Kahramanmaraş.
The agency stated that the other named Mashallah Cicek, 55, was pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building in Diyarbakir, the largest city in southeastern Turkey.
rescue operations
- Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters overnight that rescuers had pulled 67 people out of the rubble in the past 24 hours in an effort involving 31,000 rescuers across the stricken area.
- He added that about 80,000 people are receiving treatment in hospitals, while 1.05 million people have become homeless due to the earthquakes and have moved to temporary shelters.
- Oktay: “Our main goal is to ensure that they return to normal life by providing them with permanent housing within one year and that they recover from their pain as soon as possible.”
Major earthquake details
- The earthquake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and was followed by several strong aftershocks in Turkey and Syria, is ranked as the seventh deadliest natural disaster this century, surpassing the 2011 Japan earthquake and the tsunami that followed it.
- Monday’s earthquake death toll approaches the 31,000 killed in an earthquake that rocked neighboring Iran in 2003.
- A similar strong earthquake in northwest Turkey in 1999 claimed more than 17,000 lives.
- The disaster and emergency management said the death toll in Turkey rose to 20,665 on Saturday, and in Syria, more than 3,500 people were killed and many more remain under the rubble.
Hope amidst the ruins
- Teams from dozens of countries and rescuers are working day and night through the rubble of thousands of collapsed buildings to retrieve survivors buried under the rubble.
- In frigid temperatures, rescuers constantly plead for silence to hear and pick out any survivors’ voices among the piles of crumbling concrete.
- In Turkey’s Samandag region, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs and pulled out a 10-day-old baby, Yagiz Ulas’ eyes wide open. Rescuers wrapped him in a blanket and took him to a field hospital. Video clips showed emergency workers carrying his mother on a stretcher, dazed and pale.
#Turkey. #Rescue #women #including #elderly #woman #remained #rubble #hours