Emergency crews have rescued four people who were buried under rubble in different cities in Turkey about 116 hours after the earthquakes registered on Monday in the south of the country, near the border with Syria, and which have left more than 23,000 people dead.
With the help of thermal cameras and audio listening devices, a search and rescue team of volunteers found a woman alive under the ruins of a building in the city of Antioch, Turkey’s state news agency Anatolia reported.
After hours of work, Turkish emergency services, with the help of volunteers and NGO staff, managed to open a corridor to pull out the woman, who was later transferred to a nearby medical center.
In the town of Kahramanmaras, the center of the earthquakes, an Israeli search and rescue team managed to pull out alive a child who had remained under the rubble for 116 hours.
After the rescue, eight-year-old Ridvan Cakiroglu was taken to hospital by ambulance.
Just two hours earlier, two people, one of whom was disabled, according to the agency, were rescued from under the ruins of a block of apartments in the city of Gaziantep. They were later taken to a hospital.
The successful rescue team was made up of Turkish security guards, gendarmerie and a group of miners, who after three hours of work were able to make their way to the survivors.
On the fifth day since the earthquakes, the emergency services continue to search for living people to rescue, a task that becomes more difficult with each passing hour, since the standard time a human being can remain without food or water intake in disasters like this is 72 hours.
The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), under the Turkish Interior Ministry, has indicated that nearly 160,000 search and rescue team members — including international teams and NGOs — are working in the affected areas. Large quantities of rescue equipment, meals, basic necessities and psychosocial support groups have been sent to the region.
The earthquake has caused more than 20,000 deaths in Turkey and almost 3,500 between the figures offered by the health authorities of the government of Bashar al-Assad and those of the rebels in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo (northwest), according to various balances published during the last hours.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)