Rescuers fight sheer scope of disaster
Death toll of Turkey, Syria quake hits 7,700
GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Rescue workers dug through rubble Tuesday to find survivors of the most powerful and deadly earthquake to hit Turkey and Syria in decades, toiling in a vast and desperate search complicated by geography and geopolitics, freezing weather, and the sheer scope of the disaster.
Even as they struggled to free people from the tombs of metal, concrete, and wood where apartments and office buildings once stood, the death toll climbed. At least 7,700 people were reported dead, officials said.
The crews found reason for hope, rescuing more than 8,000 people in Turkey alone. But they were also working against time as temperatures sank below freezing. Survivors, many barefoot and in sleeping clothes, huddled around bonfires of wreckage to stay warm.
Rescue teams shoveled snow as it piled up on the debris, searching for the injured and trapped. In Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the epicenter of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, which struck Monday, four members of one family were painstakingly rescued, one at a time. In northwest Syria, residents found an infant crying in the rubble, seemingly the only survivor of a building collapse and who had spent hours in the cold.
“We have to fight against the weather and the earthquake at the same time,” said the Turkish vice president, Fuat Oktay, calling the quake the “disaster of the century.”
In Turkey, the rescue efforts spanned 10 provinces and hundreds of miles, from the sprawling, ancient city of Gaziantep to rural towns and villages where roads buckled so badly they could not be used. The Turkish navy sent ships with heavy machinery, blankets, generators, and food, and the national emergency management agency dispatched more than 16,000 workers, 3,000 machines, and 600 cranes to heave debris.
Many of the rescue workers were volunteers who had no plan other than to help out where they could. “We are here because of our conscience and because we always side with the weak ones,” said Mehmet Bodur, 55, in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa.
“We are face to face with one of the biggest disasters ever for our region,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said in a televised address from the capital, Ankara, as he declared a three-month state of emergency in the provinces affected.
In Syria, where more than a decade of civil war had already created a humanitarian crisis, rescue efforts were hampered by the location of the quake zone, which includes governmentand opposition-controlled lands.
“People are driving bodies to us in their personal cars,” said Nehad Abdulmajeed, a doctor near the city of Idlib, Syria.
“We have cried over children, who lived through this war and are now dead for no reason,” he said.
“I believed that maybe I had seen everything,” he added, “but these are the most tragic days that I have seen in my entire life.”
Syria cannot receive direct aid from many countries because of Western sanctions against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government. The only United Nations-approved crossing for aid between Syria and Turkey — a lifeline for opposition-held areas in the north — was closed because of earthquake damage, UN officials said, posing serious logistical obstacles to relief efforts.
But hopes that aid could reach rebel-controlled areas by other routes were piqued by a statement Tuesday by Syria’s foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad. Pleading for international support on Lebanese TV, he said his government was ready to allow aid for quake victims to enter all regions, provided the aid did not reach armed terrorist groups.
Every problem seemed to be compounded by another. A huge fire broke out Tuesday at one of Turkey’s major ports, disrupting the arrival of supplies. An economic crisis had already been battering many Turkish families, meaning resources were increasingly scant for months before the earthquake.