Family of 5 spent more than 100 hours in rubble of Turkey’s earthquake. They emerged alive

Rescue teams in Turkey on Saturday pulled out a family of five who survived a collapsed house five days after a massive earthquake hit the Turkish-Syrian border region. However, the death toll has reached nearly 25,000.

They first evicted mother and daughter Havva and Fatmagul Aslan from a pile of rubble in the city of Nurdagi, in Gaziantep province, HaberTurk reported. The team then reached the father, Hasan Aslan, but he insisted that his other daughter, Zeynep, and son Saltik Bugra be saved first.

Then, when the father was brought out, the rescuers cheered and said “God is great!”

Two hours later, a three-year-old girl and her father were pulled from the rubble in Islahiye city, also in Gaziantep province, and an hour after that a seven-year-old girl was rescued in Hatay province, almost 132 hours after the earthquake. Rescue efforts resulted in 12 people being rescued on Saturday, although hopes dwindled in freezing temperatures.

“What day?” Kamil Can Agas, 16, asked rescuers after being pulled out of the rubble in Kahramanmaras, according to NTV television.

Shimmers of hope

Members of the mixed Turkish and Kyrgyz search team hugged each other, as did the boy’s siblings, with one saying: “He’s out, brother. He’s out.

The rescue brought joy amid widespread destruction after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake toppled thousands of buildings, killing more than 24,500 people, injuring 80,000 others and leaving millions homeless. Another earthquake of similar magnitude and possibly triggered by the first quake caused more damage hours later.

Not all ends well, however. Rescuers reached a 13-year-old girl in the rubble of a collapsed building in Hatay province early Saturday and intubated her. But he died before medical teams could amputate his limbs and free him from the rubble, Hurriyet newspaper reported.

Although experts say that trapped people can survive for a week or more, the chances of finding more survivors are diminishing over time. Rescuers turned to thermal cameras to help identify life in the wreckage, a sign of the weakness of survivors.

As help continued to arrive, a group of 99 members of the Indian Army’s medical aid team began treating the wounded at a makeshift field hospital in the southern town of Iskenderun, where the main hospital had been demolished.

A man, Sukru Canbulat, was taken to the hospital in a wheelchair, his left leg was badly injured with deep bruising, contusion and cuts.

In pain, he said he had been rescued from a collapsed apartment building in the city of Antakya in the hours after the earthquake. But after receiving basic first aid, he was released without proper treatment for his injuries.

“I buried it [everyone that I lost]then I came here,” Canbulat said, counting his relatives: “My son is dead, my brother is dead, my aunt and her daughter, and her son’s wife” who is 8 1/2 months pregnant.

A large makeshift cemetery is being built on the outskirts of Antakya. Backhoes and bulldozers dig up pits in a field on the northeastern edge of the city as trucks and ambulances loaded with black body bags arrive steadily. A trooper directing traffic on a busy side street warned motorists not to take photos.

Hundreds of graves, no more than a meter apart, are marked with simple wooden boards set vertically into the ground.

Artificial graves

A worker with Turkey’s Religious Ministry, who did not want to be identified because of an order not to share information with the media, said about 800 bodies were brought to the cemetery on Friday, the first day of operations. By noon on Saturday, he said, about 2,000 had been buried.

“The people who came out of the ruins now, it’s a miracle that they survived. Most of the people who came out now are dead, and they came here,” he said.

Temperatures remained below freezing in large areas, and many people had no shelter. The Turkish government has distributed millions of hot meals, as well as tents and blankets, but is still struggling to reach many people in need.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting earthquake-hit Diyarbakir, said universities would move to distance education until the summer, to free up state-run dormitories for the homeless.

In the town of Kahramanmaras, where the stadium was turned into a makeshift camp, survivors walked among hundreds of tents, queuing for hot meals and huddling around fires.

In Antakya, an international charity helping Syrian refugees in Turkey has offered shelter to dozens in the grounds of intact buildings on the outskirts of the city.

“The problem is that there is not a single habitable house in Antakya, so the only shelter is the street,” said Ahmed Abou el-Shaar, founder of the Molham charity.

The disaster has added to the suffering in a region forgotten by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people in the country and made them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.

More than 5 million are homeless

The conflict has isolated many parts of Syria and complicated efforts to get help. The United Nations said the first earthquake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday, a day after aid shipments were planned before the disaster hit.

The UN refugee agency estimates that there are 5.3 million homeless people in Syria.

President Bashar al-Assad and his wife have visited injured earthquake victims in a hospital in the coastal city of Latakia, a base of support for the Syrian leader.

Syrian state TV said Assad and his wife, Asma, on Saturday morning visited Duha Nurallah, 60, and her son, Ibrahim Zakariya, 22, who were pulled from the rubble the previous night in the coastal town of Jableh.

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, arrived in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, carrying 35 tons of medical equipment, state news agency SANA reported. He said another plane carrying an additional 30 tons of medical equipment would arrive in a few days.

The Syrian Civil Defense opposition, also known as the White Helmets, said on Saturday that it was “almost impossible to find people alive.”

The death toll in rebel-held areas in northwestern Syria has reached 2,166, many of them women and children. The death toll in Syria stood at 3,533, while in Turkey, officials counted 21,043 deaths as of Saturday.