This week’s devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria have already claimed the lives of more than 28,000 people as the international community continues relief efforts and rescue teams make a final push to continue to find survivors, five days after the quakes.
According to the latest official toll on Saturday provided by Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay, at least 24,617 people have died in Turkey alone, where the number of injured is 80,278. In neighboring Syria, 3,553 people are reported dead and 5,276 injured, for a total of 28,170 deaths.
Oktay has assured that «we will continue with the search and rescue operations with all our might». «There are 32,071 unnamed heroes in our rescue teams. Technology and rescue dogs are being used. Bad news keeps coming in,» he explained in statements reported by the daily ‘Hürriyet’.
Meanwhile, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, has already expressed his fear on Saturday that the final death toll from the earthquakes may end up exceeding 50,000 once the actual count of victims begins.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the city of Diyarbakir on Saturday, where he stressed that the current earthquake «is three times bigger and three times more destructive than the one in 1999, which was so far the biggest disaster in the history of our country,» according to the official Turkish news agency Anatolia. In 1999, some 18,000 people were killed in the Istanbul area.
In addition, Erdogan stressed that 160,000 troops have been mobilized in the ten affected provinces, in addition to the teams sent from abroad.
«We have mobilized all the means of the state. Trust, believe us. We are not going to leave our citizens on the streets experiencing hardship and poverty. We are planning the reconstruction of hundreds of thousands of houses and the reconstruction of our cities,» he stressed. Erdogan also announced that until the end of the current academic year, universities will continue with online classes in order to allocate halls of residence to accommodate survivors.
Turkey’s disaster management agency, AFAD, has confirmed that more than 90,000 people have been evacuated from the ten Turkish provinces affected by the earthquake and more than 166,000 rescue teams and volunteers, including some 8,000 foreign rescue specialists, are currently on the ground.
In the last hours, Turkish emergency services have managed to pull out alive a 70-year-old woman and a 55-year-old woman about 122 hours after they were buried under the rubble of two destroyed buildings in the cities of Kahramanmaras and Diyarbakir, all this after the earthquakes registered on Monday in the south of the country, near the Syrian border.
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 AFAD and other Turkish emergency services led them to rescue twelve people during the day on Saturday, including a two-month-old baby.
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 go without food or water intake in disasters such as this is 72 hours. It has already been 132 hours and the low temperatures make survival even more difficult.
However, countries such as Germany and Austria have announced the suspension of rescue work in the Turkish province of Hatay, the most affected by the earthquakes, due to an increase in threats to the safety of their members, either because of the growing tension of the local population in the face of the slow arrival of aid or because of sporadic clashes between armed groups.
Although the Army does not identify these groups, the province has been the scene of occasional clashes between the Turkish Army and the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), at war with Ankara for decades.
14 DETAINED IN TURKEY FOR NEGLIGENCE IN CONSTRUCTION In the last few hours it has also been reported that at least 14 people have been arrested in Turkey and 33 others are wanted for negligence in the construction of buildings that collapsed in the devastating earthquake.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office is thus pursuing some thirty builders in the city of Diyarbakir, whose buildings, for example, had foundations of less to free up space, reports the official Anatolia news agency.
One of the detained contractors, Mehmet Ertan Akay, was caught at Istanbul airport while trying to escape to Montenegro with a large amount of cash. Nine others have been arrested in the towns of Sanliurfa and Osmaniye.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
