Turkey Earthquake rescue efforts, said to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “not as rapid as we expected them to be.”
Four days after the region’s biggest earthquake in 20 years struck, officials report that there have been more than 23,700 verified deaths in Turkey and northwest Syria.
Over 17,000 people died in a similar-sized earthquake that struck northwest Turkey in 1999, but the number of fatalities from the 7.8 magnitude quake that struck early on Monday and many strong aftershocks has surpassed that number.
During his Friday visit to the province of Adiyaman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged that the administration’s response should have been more effective.
The search efforts are not moving as quickly as we would like them to, he continued, despite the fact that we currently have the largest search and rescue team in the world.
Resul Serdar of Al Jazeera reported that rescue workers had grown “frantic” as time went on and the likelihood of recovering survivors dwindled.
Rescuers were “digging into the rubble and hoping to find some people dead or alive because it has been more than 96 hours and the hopes here are fading,” he said, standing in front of a collapsed building block in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, not far from the epicentre of the first magnitude 7.8 earthquake. He said, “The families are here, anxiously waiting.” “The extent of the destruction is beyond comprehension.”
110 hours after the earthquake struck, rescuers eventually found a guy still alive buried beneath the wreckage, according to Serdar. From the Turkish city of Gaziantep, Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker reported that entire families have perished.
“We had a conversation with this woman. Four of my brothers, my mother, my relatives, and all of my nieces and nephews were all lost in an instant when the building just flattened over itself, the woman claimed. The head of Turkey’s major opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, criticized the government’s response.
The lack of cooperation, poor planning, and incompetence, according to Kilicdaroglu, were far more significant than the size of the earthquake.
The disaster is expected to influence Erdogan’s campaign for reelection, which is due for May 14. There is already simmering resentment over the delays in assistance deliveries and the start of the rescue attempt. Due to the catastrophe, the election may now be delayed. We are overwhelmed.
According to the Turkish health minister, there have already been 20,213 fatalities in Turkey. There have been more than 3,500 fatalities in Syria. More people are still hidden behind the debris.
The government of Syria on Friday permitted humanitarian aid delivery across the front lines of the nation’s 12-year war, a decision that might hasten the receipt of aid for millions of needy people.
As the war-torn region of Syria’s northwest is controlled by rebels, the World Food Programme had warned that supplies were running low. A dire plea for help was made by Dr. Mohamed Alabrash, a general surgeon at the Central Hospital of Idlib in northwest Syria.
He told Al Jazeera, “We have a shortage of drugs and equipment.” The intensive care unit and the hospital are both overflowing with patients.
“With this many patients, we cannot keep up. We require further support because the patients’ injuries are severe.
According to the doctor, the hospital’s medical staff members work nonstop under intense strain.
The hospital’s generators were virtually out of fuel, according to Alabrash, who also noted that “all medical staff are working for 24 hours and we’ve devoured all the resources that we have, from medication to ICU materials.”
While the world is in ruins, there is yet hope
Rescuers, including teams from other nations, searched through the wreckage of tens of thousands of destroyed buildings all day and night for hidden survivors. They frequently yelled for stillness as they searched for any sign of life from broken concrete piles in the icy air.
Rescue workers gingerly reached through the wreckage in Turkey’s Samandag district while crouching beneath concrete slabs and muttering “Inshallah” (God willing). They pulled out a newborn who was just 10 days old.
Baby Yagiz Ulas was transported to a field hospital with his eyes wide open and was wrapped in a warm blanket. On a stretcher, his mother was also taken away by emergency personnel while appearing confused and pale.
Rescuers from the White Helmets organization used their hands to dig through cement and plaster in Syria to find a small girl’s bare foot who was still wearing her pink pajamas and was alive but dirty. However, there were dwindling signs that more people would be found alive. Naser al-Wakaa wailed and covered his face in a set of baby clothing that had belonged to one of his children as he sat on the mound of twisted metal and debris that had once been his family’s home in the Syrian village of Jandaris.
He screamed the name of one of his deceased children, “Bilal, oh Bilal,” as he wept.
Bulent Yildirim, the director of Turkey’s Humanitarian Relief Foundation, visited Syria to assess the situation there. It appeared as though a missile had been dropped on each and every structure, he continued.
According to Turkish authorities and the UN, an area covering around 450 km (280 miles) from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east has a population of about 24.4 million people in both Syria and Turkey.
As far south as Hama in Syria, 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the epicenter, individuals were killed.
In the bleak winter weather, hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless and hungry, and politicians in both nations have been criticized for their reaction.
Numerous individuals have erected shelters in parking lots for supermarkets, mosques, along roadsides, and even among the ruins. Food, water, and heat are in short supply for many survivors.
