Teams rescue survivors in Turkey, one week after earthquake

Rescue workers in Turkey pulled several people alive from collapsed buildings on Monday and were digging to find a single family’s grandmother, mother and daughter, a week after the country’s worst earthquake in modern history. With hopes of finding many more survivors in the rubble rapidly dwindling, the official death toll in Turkey and neighboring Syria since last Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake has risen to more than 37. thousand and should continue to increase. The rescue phase is “coming to an end”, with the urgency now shifting to providing shelter, food, education and psychosocial care to those affected, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo, in northern Syria, this Monday. Rescues About 176 hours after the first earthquake, a woman named Serap Donmez was pulled alive today from a collapsed apartment building in Antakya by search and rescue teams from Turkey and Oman, state broadcaster TRT reported. Another woman was rescued in the southern province of Gaziantep a few hours earlier, CNN Turkish reported. One person was rescued from the rubble of a building in the city of Adiyaman, officials said. Rescue workers in Kahramanmaras learned of a grandmother, mother and baby trapped in one room of a three-story building, with a fourth person possibly in another room. Rescuers said they were trying to break through a wall to reach survivors, but a column was slowing them down. Members of a Spanish rescue team, Turkish army and police search teams were working in the building, which remained largely intact. “They are still alive and in very good condition. We are doing our best to get them and I have a strong feeling that we are going to get them,” said Burcu Baldauf, head of the Turkish health volunteer team. Tragedy Turkey’s deadliest earthquake since 1939 killed 31,643 people, Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said. More than 4,300 people died and 7,6 were injured in northwest Syria as of Sunday (12), according to a UN agency. The quake is now the sixth deadliest natural disaster this century, behind the 2005 quake that killed at least 73,000 in Pakistan. In Syria, the disaster hit the rebel-held northwest hardest, leaving many people homeless again who had already been displaced several times by a decade-long civil war. The region received little aid compared to government-controlled areas. “What’s most striking here is that even in Aleppo, which has suffered so much these many years, this moment, that moment … was the worst these people have lived through,” said the UN’s Griffiths. Currently, there is only a single crossing open on the Turkey-Syria border for UN relief supplies. Griffiths said the UN would have help moving from government-held regions in Syria to the rebel-held northwest. The United States urged the Syrian government and all other parties to immediately grant humanitarian access to all those in need. *Reproduction of this content is prohibited

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