A toddler, a father with his five-year-old daughter, and a 10-year-old girl have been rescued from the rubble of collapsed buildings in southern Turkey, almost a week after the earthquake that flattened the region and neighbouring north-west Syria.
With rescue efforts in their sixth day, the window for finding survivors is shrinking rapidly. Experts say the survival rate of people trapped after an earthquake is 74% within 24 hours but falls to 22% after 72 hours and just 6% by the fifth day.
Rescuers from around the world, however, continue to pull people alive from the wreckage of their homes. “Hello beautiful girl, we are here to take you out,” a rescuer said as he pulled Emira, aged five, from the rubble in Kocaeli municipality.
Video released by Istanbul city hall also showed rescuers in Hatay pulling a 10-year-old girl, named Cudi, through a hole in the floor of a damaged building before carrying her out on a stretcher. She had been buried for 147 hours.
A seven-month-old baby named Hamza was also rescued on Sunday in Hatay. A video released by the Turkish health ministry showed the infant lying silently on a stretcher, bruised and covered in dust, as rescuers carried her to a waiting ambulance.
Again in Hatay, a Romanian rescue team stretchered Mustafa Sarıgül, 35, wrapped in a gold foil blanket, down a pile of debris from a ruined six-storey building about 149 hours after the quake struck, according to video from CNN Turk.
“His health is good, he was talking,” one of the rescuers told the broadcaster “He was saying, ‘Get me out of here quickly, I’ve got claustrophobia’.”
About 180km (110 miles) to the north, in the city of Kahramanmaraş, 27-year-old Muhammed Habib recited the Qur’an to rescuers during a 10-hour operation to extricate him. Video showed him pumping his fist in the air, yelling “God is greatest” to the cheers of rescuers below as he was finally winched out by machinery.
Also in Kahramanmaraş, the centre of Monday’s 7.8- and 7.6-magnitude quakes, 70-year-old Menekse Tabak was pulled out from the concrete to applause and cries praising God, according to a video on state broadcaster TRT Haber. “Is the world there?” she asked as she was winched to safety.
Esma Sultan, 13, was also saved in Gaziantep, state media reported, along with Sezai Karabas and his young daughter, 132 hours after the earthquake struck. Elsewhere, however, families were racing against time to find their missing relatives’ bodies.
“We hear the authorities will no longer keep the bodies waiting after a certain period of time, they say they will take them and bury them,” Tuba Yolcu told AFP in Kahramanmaraş.
Another family clutched each other in grief at a makeshift cemetery, with a seemingly endless stream of bodies arriving for swift burial. The combined death toll from Monday’s twin quakes has risen to more than 33,000 and is expected to rise further.
