Rescuers in Turkey rescued a family of five alive on Saturday (11) from the rubble of the house where they lived, which collapsed in this week’s earthquake – the worst to hit the country since 1939 -, reported the Turkish news website HaberTurk.
The rescue comes 129 hours after the tremor in Turkey and neighboring Syria and brings to nine the number of people recovered alive on Saturday, with the death toll having passed 24,000. Among the survivors are a disoriented 16-year-old and a 70-year-old woman.
“What Day is Today?” asked Kamil Can Agas, the teenager pulled from the rubble in Kahramanmaras, according to a report on NTV television. The Turkish city, close to the epicenter of the earthquake, is now experiencing a scene of trucks collecting the concrete remains of the houses and buildings that collapsed.
As time goes by, however, hopes of finding survivors diminish, even more so against a backdrop of freezing temperatures. Around 80,000 people are being treated in Turkish hospitals, while more than a million evacuees have been moved to temporary shelters.
For the first time in 35 years, the border crossing between Turkey and Armenia was opened on Saturday, the official Turkish news agency Anadolu reported. Five trucks with aid for the victims crossed the Alican checkpoint, in the province of Igdir.
The tragedy raised questions about Turkey’s response time, and President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that authorities should have reacted more quickly. In addition, preparing buildings to face earthquakes was also on the agenda for the day.
Meanwhile, in the rebel enclave in northern Syria, which suffered the worst damage in the country from the earthquake, relief efforts are complicated by the civil war that has been going on for more than a decade.
Little aid has been sent to the region so far, even after the Damascus government said on Friday it would allow convoys to cross the front lines of the war. On the other hand, dozens of planes carrying humanitarian aid arrived in government-controlled areas of the country.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first trip to the affected areas, visiting hospitals in Aleppo on Friday and Latakia on Saturday. Also on Saturday, the Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, arrived in Aleppo to visit hospitals and reception centers with the country’s authorities.
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit both countries early on Monday (6). The epicenter was recorded in an area already sensitive to natural calamities, due to the region with a high concentration of seismic events, and human events, due to the groups of refugees and internally displaced persons due to the Syrian civil war.
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