At least 38 killed by quakes in Turkey
Rescue teams race against the clock in freezing temperatures to search for survivors from collapsed buildings.
ANKARA, Turkey — Working against the clock in freezing temperatures, Turkish rescue teams pulled more survivors from collapsed buildings Sunday, days after a powerful earthquake hit the country’s east. Rescued survivors wept with gratitude for their efforts.
Turkish authorities said the death toll rose to at least 38 people from the magnitude 6.8 temblor that struck Friday night.
Turkish television showed Ayse Yildiz, 35, and her 2-year-old daughter, Yusra, being dragged out of the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in the city of Elazig. They had been trapped for 28 hours.
The quake also injured over 1,600 people but at least 45 survivors have been pulled alive from the rubble so far, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sunday in Istanbul.
More than 780 aftershocks rocked the region as over 3,500 rescue experts scrambled through wrecked buildings to reach survivors, working around the clock. Rescue teams concentrated their efforts in the city’s Mustafa Pasa neighborhood and the nearby town of Sivrice.
One rescued couple was reunited with a Syrian student who had helped to dig them out of their collapsed home with his hands.
“He is our hero and angel,” a weeping Dudane Aydin said of Mahmud al Osman in an interview on Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency.
As overnight temperatures dropped to 23 degrees , emergency teams set up more than 9,500 tents for displaced residents and distributed 17,000 hot meals.
The agency said 76 buildings were destroyed and more than 1,000 were damaged by the quake. Unmanned aerial drones were being used to survey damaged neighborhoods and coordinate rescue efforts.
The Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency said 20 of the aftershocks measured magnitude 4.0 or above, including a magnitude 4.3 quake that hit the neighboring province of Malatya on Sunday morning.
At least 104 people were receiving hospital treatment after the quake, 13 of them in intensive care, Health Minister Fahrettin
Koca said.
Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu promised financial help for the victims of the quake. He then attended the funeral of five members of the same family — a married couple, their daughter and two grandchildren — with other ministers and officials. The 12-year-old boy was buried in the same coffin as his baby sister.
“You arrived two months ago. I wish you had stayed a little longer,” the children’s father, Serhat Aslan, said of his daughter.
Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, which sits atop two major fault lines.
There was an outpouring of support across Turkey for the quake victims. Some soccer clubs announced they would donate the receipts of their weekend matches while fans of the Fenerbahce soccer club threw scarves and hats on to the field during a game in Istanbul, chanting “Cold Elazig, Fenerbahce is with you!”
Quake victims were taking refuge in tents, mosques, schools, sports halls and student dormitories. Authorites warned people not to return to homes that could be unsafe.