Turkey’s emergency services have managed to pull out alive a 70-year-old woman and a 55-year-old woman nearly 122 hours after they were buried under the rubble of two destroyed buildings in the cities of Kahramanmaras and Diyarbakir, all following earthquakes in the south of the country near the Syrian border on Monday.
After an intense effort by Turkish search teams in the city of Kahramanmaras, 70-year-old Violet Tabak has been rescued from the ruins of a building located in the district of Onikisubat after 112 hours trapped, and then transferred to a hospital for medical care, Turkish state news agency Anatolia reported.
At the same time but 400 kilometers to the east, in the city of Diyarbakir, a 55-year-old woman was being pulled from under the rubble of the destroyed building in which she had spent more than five days trapped.
Rescue work carried out for hours by the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) and other Turkish emergency services in the Yenisehir district led to the rescue of Masallah Çiçek, who was suffering from a multitude of injuries and was taken to a medical center.
On the sixth day since the earthquakes, emergency services continue to search for live people to rescue, a task that becomes more difficult as each hour passes, since the standard time a human being can remain without food or water intake in disasters such as this is 72 hours.
The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), under the Turkish Interior Ministry, has indicated that nearly 160,000 search and rescue team members — including international teams and NGOs — are working in the affected areas. Large quantities of rescue equipment, meals, basic necessities and psychosocial support groups have been sent to the region.
The earthquake has caused more than 20,000 deaths in Turkey and almost 3,500 between the figures offered by the health authorities of the government of Bashar al-Assad and those of the rebels in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo (northwest), according to various balances published during the last hours.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
