Second young girl found alive four days after Turkish quake
TURKISH rescuers have found a second young girl alive in a collapsed apartment building, four days after a deadly earthquake hit the Aegean region.
Her face grey with dust, four-yearold Ayda Gezgin was carried to an ambulance flanked by cheering rescue workers in Izmir yesterday. Her rescue came a day after a three-year-old girl was saved in similar circumstances.
“We have witnessed a miracle in the 91st hour,” Tunç Soyer, the mayor of Izmir, tweeted. “Rescue teams pulled out Ayda alive. Along with the great pain we have experienced, we have this joy as well.”
As she was taken away, Ayda could be heard calling for her mother. However, hours later the body of her mother, Fidan, 38, was found in the rubble. Ayda’s brother and father, who were not at home during the earthquake, survived.
Ayda alerted rescuers to her location in the wreckage of the eight-storey apartment block. Ibrahim Topal said: “There was a very weak voice saying something like ‘I’m here’. We shut everything down and listened again. And there really was a voice.”
Rescuer Nusret Aksoy told reporters he found the girl wedged in a gap next to an oven, where she waved at him and told him she was OK.
The death toll from Friday’s earthquake reached 102 yesterday, mostly in the Turkish coastal province of Izmir, with two fatalities on the Greek island of Samos, 48 miles further south.
The 7 magnitude quake injured 994 people, according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, with 147 still in hospital.
Rescuers in Izmir were still searching five buildings for missing people.
In the worst-affected Izmir town of Bayrakli, residents experienced jubilation and sorrow on Monday as three-year-old Elif Perinek and 14-year-old Idil Sirin were rescued alive, although each child lost a sibling to the earthquake.
The country also suffered 1,464 aftershocks in the deadliest earthquake in Turkey since one in the eastern city of Van in 2011 killed about 600 people.
Turkey is bisected by major fault lines in one of the world’s most active seismic zones. In 1999, two earthquakes killed more than 17,000 people.