A toddler, a father with his five-year-old daughter, and a 10-year-old girl were rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building in southern Turkey, almost a week after the earthquake that flattened the region and neighboring areas in the north-west. Syria.
With rescue efforts in their sixth day, the window to find survivors is shrinking fast. Experts say the survival rate of people trapped after an earthquake is 74% within 24 hours but drops to 22% after 72 hours and only 6% by the fifth day.
Rescuers from around the world, however, continue to pull people alive from the destruction in their homes. “Hello beautiful girl, we are here to take you out,” said a rescuer as he pulled five-year-old Emira from the rubble of Kocaeli municipality.
Video released by Istanbul city hall also showed rescuers in Hatay pulling a 10-year-old girl, named Cudi, through a hole in the floor of a damaged building before she went on a stretcher. She was buried for 147 hours.
A seven-month-old baby named Hamza was also rescued on Sunday in Hatay. Video released by Turkey’s health ministry showed the infant lying quietly on a stretcher, crushed and covered in dust, as rescuers carried him to a waiting ambulance.
Back in Hatay, a rescue team from Romania stretched Mustafa Sarıgül, 35, wrapped in a gold foil blanket, down a pile of debris from a destroyed six-story building about 149 hours after the quake, according to a video from CNN Turk.
“His health is good, he was talking,” one of the rescuers told the broadcaster “He was saying, ‘Get out of here quickly, I have claustrophobia’.”
About 180km (110 miles) north, in the city of Kahramanmaraş, 27-year-old Muhammed Habib recited the Qur’an to rescuers during a 10-hour operation to extricate him. Video showed him pumping his fist in the air, shouting “God is greatest” to the cheers of rescuers below as he was finally thrown out by machinery.
Also in Kahramanmaraş, the center of Monday’s 7.8 and 7.6-magnitude quakes, 70-year-old Menekse Tabak was pulled out of the concrete to clap and cry in praise of God, according to a video on state broadcaster TRT Haber. “Does the world exist?” she asked as she was winched to safety.
Esma Sultan, 13, was also rescued in Gaziantep, state media reported, along with Sezai Karabas and his young daughter, 132 hours after the earthquake. Elsewhere, however, families were racing against time to find the bodies of their missing loved ones.
“We hear that the authorities will no longer keep the bodies waiting after a certain period of time, they say they will take them and bury them,” Tuba Yolcu told AFP in Kahramanmaraş.
Another family mourned each other at a converted cemetery, with a relentless stream of bodies quickly arriving for burial. The combined death toll from Monday’s twin quakes has risen to more than 33,000 and is expected to rise further.