Turkish search and rescue teams confirmed Tuesday that three people have been pulled alive from the rubble of two collapsed buildings in Kahramanmaras province, nearly 200 hours after they were trapped after the structures collapsed following earthquakes on February 6 in southern Turkey near the Syrian border.
Those rescued are a 17-year-old teenager and two people whose identities have not been revealed, according to the Turkish state news agency Anatolia, which stressed that the operations were carried out 198 hours after the first earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.4 on the Richter scale.
Shortly before, the emergency services had rescued a man who remained buried in the rubble of a destroyed building in the city of Antioch for almost 183 hours. 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 that a human being can remain without food or water intake in disasters such as this is 72 hours.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed earlier Tuesday that more than 8,000 people have been rescued alive by emergency teams, before adding that «a significant percentage» of the more than 81,000 injured have been discharged, as reported by Anatolia.
The death toll from last week’s earthquakes on the Turkish-Syrian border has risen to more than 36,200, according to the latest official figures, which put the number of dead on Turkish territory at more than 31,600 and the number of dead in Syria at more than 4,500.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
