The death toll from Sunday’s quake rose to 366 and over 1300 are injured and hundreds more are still missing after the quake and more than 200 aftershocks have been felt after the earthquake.
A rescue crew in earthquake-ravaged Turkey has pulled a 14-day-old
baby girl from the shattered ruins of a building in the city of Ercis –
miraculously still alive after 47 hours trapped.
Little Azra – her name meaning ‘Help’ in Hebrew – was found naked in
the rubble, making her survival all the more remarkable because of the
freezing temperatures in the region.
Taken from the arms of her mother, who also survived the quake but
give the baby to rescuers until she too could be freed, Azra was rushed
to a medical unit – emergency crew members cradling her fragile little
body as they scrambled over the debris to get her to safety.
The rescue gives hope to hundreds of citizens in both Ercis and Van
that their loved ones still missing after Sunday’s 7.2-magnitude
earthquake may still be alive.
Tens of thousands of people spent a second night under canvas, in
cars or huddled round small fires in towns rattled by aftershocks from a
massive earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed hundreds.
Casualties were concentrated so far in the town of Ercis and the
provincial capital Van, with officials still checking outlying areas.
Seven people were rescued overnight.
As grieving families prepared to bury their dead today, others kept
vigil by the mounds of concrete rubble and masonry, praying rescue teams
would find missing loved ones alive.
Crowds of residents gathered around collapsed buildings in the city,
falling into an eerie silence as each person strained to hear even the
faintest signs of life under the crumbled concrete and twisted steel.
The Disaster and Emergency Administration said 1,301 people had been injured and 2,262 buildings had collapsed.
The Turkish Red Crescent distributed up to 13,000 tents, and was
preparing to provide temporary shelter for about 40,000 people, although
there were no reliable estimates of the number of people left
destitute.
The trauma of the quake is one more problem to bear for Kurds, the
dominant ethnic group in southeast Turkey, where more than 40,000 people
have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.
The centre of Van, usually a vibrant city with a large population,
resembled a ghost town with no lights in the streets or buildings.
The sense of dislocation was greater in Ercis with no homes to return to.
Thousands of people, mostly men, paced the streets, stopping to look
at the destruction or whenever there was some commotion at a rescue
operation site.
At one collapsed building on the main road leading through Ercis, the
area worst hit in Sunday’s quake, exhausted rescue workers shouted at
crowds of men pushing forward to catch a glimpse as efforts were made to
free the corpse of a woman from the rubble. SANA
