Themacforums, ANTAKYA/ELBISTAN, Turkey, Feb 2023 – Rescuers in Turkey Dig to Rescue Family a Week After Earthquake. A week after the nation’s worst earthquake in modern history, rescuers in Turkey retrieved seven people alive from fallen buildings on Monday and were excavating to reach a grandmother, mother, and daughter from a single family.
The combined official death toll in Turkey and neighboring Syria from last Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake increased to nearly 36,000 and appeared to keep rising as hopes of finding much more alive in the rubble quickly faded.
United Nations humanitarian head Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria on Monday that the rescue phase is “coming to an end” and that the focus should now be on providing shelter, food, education, and psychosocial treatment.
Serap Donmez, a lady, was retrieved alive from an Antakya apartment building that had collapsed on Monday, some 176 hours after the initial earthquake, according to state television TRT.
A few hours earlier, CNN Turk claimed that another woman had been saved in the southern Gaziantep province. According to authorities, a 35-year-old was pulled from the wreckage of a building in Adiyaman city.
A grandmother, mother, and infant were trapped in one room of a three-story structure in Kahramanmaras, according to rescuers, with a fourth person likely in another room. They claimed that a column was impeding their attempts to scale a wall in order to reach the survivors.
Turkish army, police, and members of a Spanish rescue team were searching the structure, which was mainly undamaged.
“We have no idea if they are still alive. The thermal cameras have only detected heat, and there has been no sound from them “Themacforums was informed by a Turkish army soldier.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said that 31,643 people have died in the country’s biggest earthquake since 1939. According to a U.N. organization, more than 4,300 people had been reported dead and 7,600 injured in northwest Syria as of Sunday.
Behind the 2005 earthquake that left at least 73,000 dead in Pakistan, the earthquake is now the sixth deadliest natural disaster of the 20th century.
SYRIA AID
The calamity in Syria was most severe in the rebel-held northwest, forcing many people who had already been displaced by a decade-long civil war to seek new housing. Compared to places under government control, the area has received relatively little aid.
The UN’s Griffiths said that even in Aleppo, which has endured a great deal over the years, “this moment, that instant…was about the worst that these people have faced.”
In a previous tweet, he claimed that the locals had “failed” them.
Only one border crossing between Turkey and Syria is now available for U.N. assistance supplies. According to Griffiths, the UN would be relocating aid from Syria’s government-held areas to the rebel-held northwest.
The Syrian government and all other parties were urged by the United States to give prompt access to all people in need for humanitarian purposes.
According to a U.N. spokeswoman, approval problems with the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which controls much of the province, have slowed the delivery of earthquake supplies from government-held territories into territory ruled by hardline opposition groups.
According to an HTS source in Idlib, the group would not permit any shipments from areas under the control of the government and that aid would be arriving through Turkey to the north.
The UN has stated that it wants to open two more border crossings.
QUESTIONS OF SECURITY
A number of Turkish cities’ residents and humanitarian workers have reported deteriorating security circumstances, with several reports of businesses and collapsed homes being stolen.
Business owners evacuated their stores on Sunday in a crucial area of one of the worst affected cities, Antakya in southern Turkey, to save products from being taken by looters.
Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced over the weekend that rabies and tetanus vaccines had been dispatched to the earthquake zone and that mobile pharmacies had begun operating there amid worries about sanitation and the spread of infection in the area.
In reaction to criticism of his handling of the earthquake, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has pledged that the government will deal severely with looters. This comes as he prepares for the toughest election of his 20 years in office, which is set for June.
Over 1 million people were living in temporary shelters, according to Turkey’s Sunday report, while 80,000 individuals were hospitalized.
