Kahramanmaras Eight days after the devastating earthquake in south-east Turkey, people are still being rescued alive from the rubble. In the province of Kahramanmaras, helpers rescued two 17 and 21-year-old brothers on Tuesday morning, the state news agency Anadolu and the broadcaster CNN Türk reported.
They were therefore 198 hours under the rubble. In the province of Adiyaman, an 18-year-old who had been buried for a similar length of time was rescued. According to Anadolu, a 26-year-old woman was also found alive under the ruins in Hatay province after more than eight days.
Normally, people without access to water and food can survive for a maximum of three to five days. Temperatures also play a crucial role. In the past few days, they have dropped to minus six degrees in the earthquake region. According to experts, this has significantly reduced the chances of survival.
Early Monday morning a week ago, a first earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 shook southeast Turkey at 2.17 a.m. (CET), followed hours later by a second severe earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6.
The number of confirmed dead was more than 37,500 in Turkey and Syria as of Tuesday morning, and more than 80,000 people were injured. Thousands continue to be missing. Many places in the region have been leveled to the ground, hundreds of thousands of survivors are homeless.
Access to water saves lives
Emergency services rescued a 13-year-old from under the rubble early Monday evening after 182 hours. They carried the boy to the ambulance in Hatay province on a stretcher, as pictures from state broadcaster TRT showed. A helper held the boy’s hand. Survivors found after so many hours must have had access to liquid – like rainwater or snow.
Professor Eduardo Reinoso Angulo, an engineer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimates the probability of finding people alive now is very low. The chances of surviving people in the rubble fell drastically after five days and approached zero after nine days, Reinoso Angulo said. The scientist is the lead author of a 2017 study looking at earthquake deaths.
However, there are always exceptions. This is also due to the fact that the rescue workers sometimes work very efficiently and help each other despite the difficult circumstances on site. So there is a whole range of different helpers on site.
About Uwe Elze and his search dog Pia. The dog trainer from Celle in Lower Saxony immediately volunteered at the Turkish consulate after the reports about the earthquake. Twelve hours later he was on the plane. “The organization on site is indescribably good.”
The German rescue dog handler Uwe Elze with his dog Pia on the edge of a rubble field.
(Photo: dpa)
However, there is hardly any time for sleep and the conditions are challenging. In the morning he wakes up in his tent with a frozen hat. Elze is one of more than 100,000 volunteers who traveled to the earthquake region. He and his dog Pia have already found 60 survivors in the rubble.
A week of mourning has been declared
In addition to the doctors and search and rescue teams from Turkey and abroad, Turkish miners are also on duty. Not only do they have experience with buried people, they also know exactly how to work your way up to them. In addition to the professionally trained rescue workers, the miners can significantly increase the chances of survival for those buried.
They dig a small tunnel through which they can provide basic necessities, such as water and glucose, to the people trapped in the rubble. Then they build a kind of tunnel, as known from underground mining, with wooden supports and pillars to be able to rescue the victims.
Feeding the survivors and those buried is a huge logistical challenge.
(Photo: Reuters)
In the southern Turkish city of Antakya, you can see what effect this sheer mass of different expertise has. Although most of the city has been completely destroyed, people are still being rescued from the rubble. On the big Saray street one sees only ruins left and right. But at regular intervals, rescue workers call out sentences like “He’s still alive!” or “We need an ambulance” from the rubble.
The people of Syria could only wish for such a powerful search and rescue operation. Due to the civil war and the country’s international isolation, many buildings are very unstable. After the tremors, they immediately collapsed. And after that, hardly any helpers came into the country.
The rescue organization White Helmets, which is looking for victims of the earthquake disaster in north-west Syria, has now declared a week-long mourning. This indicates that the civil protection officers no longer expect to find any survivors under the rubble. From Monday the flags will fly at half mast.
More: Hardly any help as the Syrians have to get through the days after the earthquake alone