6-yr-old girl among rescued week after quake in Turkey; toll 37,000
istanbul, February 13
Rescuers in Turkey pulled out several people alive from collapsed buildings on Monday and were digging to reach a grandmother, mother and daughter from a single family, a week after the country’s worst earthquake in modern history.
A young girl named Miray was rescued from the rubble of an apartment block in the southern Turkish city of Adiyaman, 178 hours after the devastating earthquake.
With hopes of finding many more survivors in the rubble fast fading, the combined death toll in Turkey and neighbouring Syria from last Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake rose above 37,000 and looked set to keep increasing.
The rescue phase is “coming to a close”, with the focus now switching to providing shelter, food and schooling, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria on Monday.
But as he was speaking, teams in southeastern Turkey plucked more people from the rubble. Officials said a young girl named Miray was rescued in Adiyaman 178 hours after the earthquake and a 35-year-old woman was also rescued in the same city.
A woman was carried alive from a mess of crumbled masonry and twisted steel rods in Antakya, a video shared online by the mayor of Istanbul showed. Workers clapped as she was put in an ambulance. — Reuters
