Turkey’s emergency services have managed to pull a 70-year-old woman alive nearly 212 hours after she was buried under the rubble of a destroyed building in the city of Gaziantep, all in the wake of last week’s earthquakes in the south of the country near the Syrian border.
After an intense effort by Turkish search teams in the city of Adiyaman, 70-year-old Fatma Gungor has been rescued from the ruins of a seven-storey building after 212 hours trapped, and then transferred to a hospital where she is receiving medical care, Turkish state news agency Anatolia reported.
After the rescue, Gungor’s relatives – who were waiting around the wreckage – have hugged and thanked the search and rescue teams for bringing out alive the woman, who had been buried for almost nine days.
A week after the earthquakes, emergency services continue to search for living people to rescue, a task that becomes more difficult with each passing hour, since the standard time a human being can remain without food or water in a disaster like this is 72 hours.
The earthquake has caused 35,500 dead in Turkey and more than 3,700 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.
