Image - Reuters/Ap
Antakya - Families in southern Turkey and Syria spent a second night in the freezing cold on Wednesday as thinly stretched rescue teams worked through the night, racing against time, pulling more bodies from the rubble of thousands of buildings toppled by the massive earthquake that killed more than 11,500 people.
Rescuers in Turkey and in neighbouring Syria warned that the death toll would keep rising as some survivors said help had yet to arrive.
The quake is deadliest in Turkey since the 1991 quake and one of the deadliest since the 2011 Japan earthquake that triggered a tsunami, killing nearly 20,000 people.
Amid calls for the government to send more help to the disaster zone, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was to travel to town of Pazarcik, the epicenter of the quake, and to the worst-hit province of Hatay on Wednesday.
Turkey now has some 60,000 aid personnel in the quake-hit zone, but with the devastation so widespread many are still waiting for help.
With the scale of the disaster becoming ever more apparent, the death toll rose above 9,057 in Turkey alone. In Syria, already devastated by 11 years of war, the confirmed toll climbed to more than 2,500 overnight, according to the Syrian government and a rescue service operating in the rebel-held northwest.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has declared a state of emergency in 10 provinces on Tuesday. However residents in several damaged Turkish cities have voiced anger and despair at what they said was a slow and inadequate response by the authorities.
The initial quake, followed hours later by a second one almost as powerful, struck just after 4 a.m. on Monday, giving the sleeping population little chance to react.
It toppled thousands of buildings including hospitals, schools and apartment blocks, injured tens of thousands, and left countless people homeless in Turkey and northern Syria.
Turkish authorities say some 13.5 million people were affected in an area spanning roughly 450 km from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east - broader than the distance between Boston and Philadelphia, or Amsterdam and Paris.
In Syria, it killed people as far south as Hama, some 100km from the epicentre.
Turkey's disaster management agency said the number of injured was above 38,000.
Hope from under the rubble
Nearly two days after the magnitude 7.8 quake struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, rescuers pulled a 3-year-old boy, Arif Kaan, from beneath the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Kahramanmaras, a city not far from the epicenter.
With the boy’s lower body trapped under slabs of concrete and twisted rebar, emergency crews lay a blanket over his torso to protect him from below-freezing temperatures as they carefully cut the debris away from him, mindful of the possibility of triggering another collapse.
The boy’s father, Ertugrul Kisi, who himself had been rescued earlier, sobbed as his son was pulled free and loaded into an ambulance.
A few hours later, rescuers pulled 10-year-old Betul Edis from the rubble of her home in the city of Adiyaman. Amid applause from onlookers, her grandfather kissed her and spoke softly to her as she was loaded on an ambulance.
Muhammet Ruzgar, 5, was carried out by rescuers from the site of a damaged building in Hatay, Turkey.
Rescuers are racing against time to pull survivors from rubble after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey on February 6. Unstable piles of metal and concrete made the search efforts perilous, while freezing temperatures made them ever more urgent.
-AP/Reuters