Turkey Quake Rescuers Still Finding ‘Miracle’ Survivors as Death Toll Grows

Rescuer workers carry Kaan, a 13-year-old Turkish teenager, to an ambulance after being rescued from the rubble after 182 hours, in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in Hatay, Turkey Feb. 13, 2023. Dilara Senkaya/Reuters

Rescuers in Turkey pulled several people alive from collapsed buildings on Monday, a week after the country’s worst earthquake in modern history, but hopes of many more survivors were fading.

Stories of near-miraculous rescues have flooded the airwaves in recent days, including many that were broadcast live on Turkish television and beamed around the world. But tens of thousands of dead have been found during the same period.

Rescue workers in Kahramanmeras province made contact on Monday with three survivors, believed to be a mother, daughter, and baby, in the ruins of a building.

A woman on the same day was pulled out alive from a collapsed apartment block in Hatay province by search and rescue teams from Turkey and Oman, state broadcaster TRT reported.

Another woman was rescued in southern Gaziantep province a few hours earlier, CNN Turk reported. A 35-year-old was rescued from the rubble of a building in Adiyaman city, officials said.

A son of a Turkish woman Saadet Sendag reacts as his mother is rescued after 177 hours, at the site of a collapsed building in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in Hatay, Turkey, on Feb. 13, 2023. Umit Bektas/Reuters

Earlier, a man was rescued Sunday by rescuers from Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus, the Russian authorities said.

“Rescue work to remove the man from the rubble lasted more than four hours,” the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations said on the Telegram messaging platform on Monday, alongside a video showing rescuers pulling a man from the rubble and carrying him away.

“The work was carried out at night with a risk to life coming from a possible collapse of structures.”

The rescue took place in Kahramanmeras province in southern Turkey.

Rescue Window Closing

Experts say the window for such rescues has nearly closed, given the length of time that has passed, the fact that temperatures have fallen to minus 6 degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit), and the severity of the building collapses.

The death toll from the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6, rose to more than 33,000 on Tuesday and looked set to keep growing.

A drone view of destroyed houses, in the aftermath of the deadly earthquake, in Elbistan town, Kahramanmaras, Turkey, on Feb. 12, 2023. Issam Abdallah/Reuters

The rescue phase is “coming to a close,” with urgency now switching to providing shelter, food, schooling, and psychosocial care, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria on Monday.

In Syria, the disaster hit hardest in the rebel-held northwest, leaving homeless yet again many people who had already been displaced several times by a decade-old civil war. The region has received little aid compared with government-held areas.

The United States called on the Syrian government and all other parties to immediately grant humanitarian access to all those in need, given the difficulties in the rebel-held northwest.

Thousands were also left homeless by the quake, and are now living in tents or lining up for hot meals in Turkey.

Residents and aid workers from several Turkish cities have cited worsening security conditions, with widespread accounts of businesses and collapsed homes being robbed.

The quake is the sixth most deadly natural disaster this century, behind the 2005 tremor that killed at least 73,000 in Pakistan.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.