“Rescue Efforts Continue as Death Toll From Turkey-Syria Earthquake Mounts”
ADANA, Turkey (AP) — Rescue workers scrambled Tuesday to rescue survivors from the rubble of thousands of buildings destroyed by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and multiple aftershocks that battered eastern Turkey and neighboring Syria. The discovery of more bodies brought the death toll to 4,600.
Countries around the world dispatched teams to help with rescue efforts, but a day after the quake, rescue workers on the ground remained sparse as their efforts were hampered by freezing temperatures and nearly 200 aftershocks, making the search for unstable structures dangerous .
Nurgul Atay told The Associated Press she could hear her mother’s voice under the rubble of a collapsed building in the city of Antakya, capital of Hatay province, but her and other efforts to get into the ruins had been in vain without rescue workers and heavy equipment to help.
“If we could just lift the concrete slab, we could reach them,” she said. “My mother is 70 years old, she won’t be able to stand it for long.”
Across Hatay province, southwest of the quake’s epicenter, officials said up to 1,500 buildings were destroyed and many people reported relatives were trapped under the rubble, with no relief or rescue teams arriving.
In areas where teams were working, cheers occasionally erupted throughout the night as survivors were pulled from the rubble.
The quake, concentrated in Turkey’s southeastern province of Kahramanmaras, sent residents of Damascus and Beirut rushing into the streets and was felt as far away as Cairo.
Medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders confirmed on Tuesday that one of its employees was among the dead and other loved ones lost after his home collapsed in Syria’s Idlib province.
“We are deeply shocked and saddened by the impact of this disaster on the thousands of people affected, including our colleagues and their families,” said Sebastien Gay, the group’s head of mission in Syria.
Gay said health facilities in northern Syria were overwhelmed with medical staff working “around the clock to respond to the large number of wounded.”
In Turkey’s Hatay province, thousands of people took refuge in sports centers or exhibition halls, while others spent the night outside, huddled around fires in blankets.
A Navy ship docked at the port of Iskenderun in the province on Tuesday, where a hospital collapsed to transport survivors in need of medical care to the nearby city of Mersin. Thick, black smoke billowed from another area of the port, where firefighters were still unable to put out a fire that broke out under shipping containers overturned by the earthquake.
In the Turkish provincial capital of Gaziantep, around 33 kilometers from the epicenter, people fled to shopping malls, stadiums, mosques and community centers.
At least 3,381 people have been killed and more than 20,000 injured in ten Turkish provinces, according to the latest figures from Turkish authorities on Tuesday. The death toll in government-held areas of Syria rose to 769 people, according to the health ministry, with around 1,450 injured. In the country’s rebel-held northwest, groups operating there said at least 450 people died and many hundreds were injured. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared seven days of national mourning.
Authorities fear the death toll will continue to rise as rescuers search for survivors in a region ravaged by Syria’s 12-year civil war and refugee crisis.
In recent pledges of international aid, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said he was preparing to quickly deploy a 60-strong search and rescue team and medical supplies. The Pakistani government sent a flight with relief supplies and a 50-strong search and rescue team early Tuesday and said there would be daily relief flights to Syria and Turkey from Wednesday. India said it would send two search and rescue teams, including specially trained dogs and medical staff.
US President Joe Biden called Erdogan to offer his condolences and help to the NATO ally. The White House said it is dispatching search and rescue teams to support Turkey’s efforts.
The quake has added further misery to a region that has seen tremendous suffering over the past decade. On the Syrian side, the affected area is divided between government-controlled territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, surrounded by Russian-backed government forces. Turkey is home to millions of refugees from the Syrian civil war.
Hundreds of families remained trapped in rubble in the rebel-held enclave, the opposition emergency organization known as the White Helmets said in a statement. The area is crowded with about 4 million people displaced from other parts of the country by the war. Many live in buildings that have already been damaged by military bombing.
Strained medical centers quickly filled with the injured, emergency workers said. Some facilities had to be evacuated, including a maternity hospital, according to the medical organization SAMW.
More than 7,800 people were rescued in 10 provinces, according to Orhan Tatar, an official with Turkey’s Disaster Management Agency.
The region lies on major fault lines and is frequently rocked by earthquakes. About 18,000 people died in 1999 in similarly powerful earthquakes in north-west Turkey.
The US Geological Survey measured the quake on Monday as having a magnitude of 7.8 and a depth of 18 kilometers (11 miles). Hours later, another 7.5 magnitude quake, likely triggered by the first, struck more than 100 kilometers away.
The second blast caused a multi-story apartment building in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa to fall onto the street in a cloud of dust as bystanders screamed, according to video of the scene.
Thousands of buildings have reportedly collapsed in a wide area stretching from the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330 kilometers (200 miles) northeast.
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Alsayed reported from Azmarin, Syria, while Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. Associated Press writers Zeynep Bilginsoy and Robert Badendieck in Istanbul, Bassem Mroue and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, and Riazat Butt in Islamabad contributed to this report.
Mehmet Guzel, Ghaith Alsayed and Suzan Fraser, The Associated Press
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