Turkish toll rises as survivors found
Source: Agencies |
October 25, 2011, Tuesday
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RESCUERS pulled survivors from beneath mounds of collapsed buildings and searched for the missing yesterday after a powerful earthquake killed at least 264 people and wounded more than 1,300 in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.
The interior minister said hundreds more were unaccounted for, many believed buried under rubble after Sunday's 7.2-magnitude quake toppled remote villages of mud brick houses.
As desperate survivors cried for help beneath mounds of smashed concrete and twisted metal, some using mobile phones, earth-moving machines and troops joined rescue efforts in the city of Van and the town of Ercis, about 100 kilometers to the north.
"Be patient, be patient," rescuers in Ercis told a whimpering boy pinned under a concrete slab with the lifeless hand of an adult, a wedding ring on one finger, visible just in front of his face.
A woman and her daughter were freed from beneath a concrete slab in the wreckage of a six-storey building.
"I'm here, I'm here," the woman named Fidan called out in a hoarse voice. Talking to her while working for more than two hours to find a way through, rescuers cut through the slab, first sighting the daughter's foot, before freeing them.
One woman, standing beside a collapsed four-story building, told a rescue worker she had spoken to her friend, Hatice Hasimoglu, on her mobile phone six hours after the quake trapped her inside it.
"She's my friend and she called me to say that she's alive and she's stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building," said her friend standing with distraught relatives begging the rescue workers to hurry.
In Van, an ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, cranes shifted rubble from a collapsed six-story apartment block where 70 people were feared trapped.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan flew to Van to assess the scale of the disaster, in a quake-prone area that is a hotbed of activity for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants.
Erdogan said he feared for the fate of villages with houses made of mud brick, saying: "Almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed."
The quake struck a remote, hilly area near the border with Iran, where villages are widely separated and the people live off stock-raising, arable farming and trading.
The hardest-hit town was Ercis, a town of 100,000, where 55 buildings crumpled.
Thousands of people made homeless by the quake were forced to spend Sunday night on the streets, wrapped in blankets and huddled round open fires.
The government has sent four army battalions to Ercis and two to Van to help in the rescue work, but some residents complained of a lack of assistance.
The interior minister said hundreds more were unaccounted for, many believed buried under rubble after Sunday's 7.2-magnitude quake toppled remote villages of mud brick houses.
As desperate survivors cried for help beneath mounds of smashed concrete and twisted metal, some using mobile phones, earth-moving machines and troops joined rescue efforts in the city of Van and the town of Ercis, about 100 kilometers to the north.
"Be patient, be patient," rescuers in Ercis told a whimpering boy pinned under a concrete slab with the lifeless hand of an adult, a wedding ring on one finger, visible just in front of his face.
A woman and her daughter were freed from beneath a concrete slab in the wreckage of a six-storey building.
"I'm here, I'm here," the woman named Fidan called out in a hoarse voice. Talking to her while working for more than two hours to find a way through, rescuers cut through the slab, first sighting the daughter's foot, before freeing them.
One woman, standing beside a collapsed four-story building, told a rescue worker she had spoken to her friend, Hatice Hasimoglu, on her mobile phone six hours after the quake trapped her inside it.
"She's my friend and she called me to say that she's alive and she's stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building," said her friend standing with distraught relatives begging the rescue workers to hurry.
In Van, an ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, cranes shifted rubble from a collapsed six-story apartment block where 70 people were feared trapped.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan flew to Van to assess the scale of the disaster, in a quake-prone area that is a hotbed of activity for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants.
Erdogan said he feared for the fate of villages with houses made of mud brick, saying: "Almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed."
The quake struck a remote, hilly area near the border with Iran, where villages are widely separated and the people live off stock-raising, arable farming and trading.
The hardest-hit town was Ercis, a town of 100,000, where 55 buildings crumpled.
Thousands of people made homeless by the quake were forced to spend Sunday night on the streets, wrapped in blankets and huddled round open fires.
The government has sent four army battalions to Ercis and two to Van to help in the rescue work, but some residents complained of a lack of assistance.
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