Turkey’s hopes have turned to miraculous survivors still being rescued after Monday’s devastating earthquakes in the nation’s southeast and Syria that killed over 25,000 people.
(Bloomberg) — Turkey’s hopes have turned to miraculous survivors still being rescued after Monday’s devastating earthquakes in the nation’s southeast and Syria that killed over 25,000 people.
On Saturday, the sixth day after the twin 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude tremblors, local media devoted coverage to rescue teams still saving lives, including an infant and a family of five.
The two-month-old baby was rescued after 128 hours under rubble in Hatay province, a multicultural area home to centuries of history that’s largely been turned into dust, according to state-run Anadolu Agency. A couple in Adiyaman, another severely affected province, was also rescued, the agency reported.
In Gaziantep province a family of five — parents along with their son and two daughters — who’ve survived since Monday in their collapsed home were extricated from the debris, Haberturk news channel reported.
Thousands of houses and buildings were wrecked across 10 provinces in Turkey in what President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the “worst disaster of the last century in the world.”
Anger has turned on Erdogan and his administration amid accusations the natural disaster was amplified by poor building standards and then by a delayed and insufficient response. Preliminary expert findings in Sanliurfa province, where 209 buildings collapsed, detected rusty steel and low quality building materials in many of the ruined structures.
Dozens of countries have dispatched teams and personnel to help with relief efforts.
Austria on Saturday said it would suspend its rescue operations in Hatay province, saying the security situation was increasingly difficult.
Pierre Kugelweis, a spokesman for the central European nation’s military, told the Austrian news wire APA of “increasing aggression between groups in Turkey,” adding that “shots are said to have been fired.”
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