Miraculous rescues follow Turkey quake
For about 200 hours, two Turkish brothers entombed under the rubble of a collapsed building in the earthquake-devastated city of Kahramanmaras held on, rationing bodybuilding supplements, drinking their own urine, swallowing gulps of air.
“Breathing was easy,” one brother, Abdulbaki Yeninar, 21, told the local Ihlas news agency. “We took protein powder.”
On Tuesday, rescue workers pried Yeninar and his brother, Muhammed Enes Yeninar, 17, from the cement and twisted metal, one of at least nine such improbable rescues over a week after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake leveled towns, killed tens of thousands of people and displaced many more in Turkey and Syria.
In the same city, teams dug a tunnel 16 feet long through fallen walls, floors and piping to reach a woman, in a rescue that was broadcast on live TV. And to the south, a volunteer mining crew joined the efforts to save another, earning tribute from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said they “will never fade away from our memories.”
The miraculous rescues served as rare bright spots in one of the bleakest periods in memory for Turkey, what Erdogan said Tuesday could reasonably be called the “disaster of the century.”
He reported a new death toll for his country, 35,418, and the United Nations said that more than 5,500 Syrians had died. Millions more people in both countries have been displaced since the quake devastated the region last week, with many afraid to return to damaged buildings and struggling to survive in makeshift shelters and extreme cold.
Relief organizations typically scramble to find survivors in the first 72 hours after a natural disaster, as the passing of time exponentially diminishes hope for finding signs of life. In the past week, more than 35,000 Turkish search and rescue teams joined thousands of international workers to dig through the rubble, according to AFAD, Turkey’s emergency management agency.
In recent days, desperation has increasingly set in as the rescue missions have turned to recovery, a humanitarian crisis has taken shape, and hard-hit and hard-to-reach Syrian towns have lamented that they have been forgotten.
On Tuesday, as the total death toll in both Syria and Turkey surpassed 40,000, Turkish authorities arrested more contractors suspected of shoddy construction that violated building codes.
Critics of Erdogan, who is seeking to defend his response to the disaster, drew attention to videos that showed him previously hailing some of the housing projects that crumbled and buried people. And Turkish police detained scores of social media users on accusations of spreading panic-inducing posts.
Finally free, the exhausted Yeninar brothers emerged from the rubble, their eyes shut and their arms bound in stretchers as rescuers in fatigues and bright vests carried them away in Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter of the quake.
Desperate for good news, the workers embraced one another and cheered as the brothers left for the hospital, where they explained how they had survived to the news media.
Rescuers had pulled their mother, also alive, out of the rubble two days earlier, and she was being treated in a hospital in the city of Kayseri for leg injuries, they said.
In the same city, the state news service Anadolu Agency broadcast the rescue of Aysegul Bayir, 35, live to a rapt Turkish audience. Viewers watched as rescue teams dug a 16-foot tunnel through the ruins to reach her.
While the footage of the survivors heartened rescue workers who had been clawing through the frigid cement for days and encouraged a grieving population, the rescues were a fleeting, and perhaps final, dose of such news.
Hours after rescue workers pulled the latest survivors from the wreckage, after night fell and the temperatures dropped again, Erdogan addressed the nation.
“Our search and rescue teams pulling out our citizens alive,” he said, “even after many long hours, is the most important source of consolation amid this dark picture.”