NURDAGI, 7 Feb: Search teams and emergency aid from around the world poured into Turkey and Syria on Tuesday as rescuers working in freezing temperatures dug \u2014 sometimes with their bare hands \u2014 through the remains of buildings flattened by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. The death toll soared above 5,000 and was still expected to rise.
\nBut with the damage spread over a wide area, the massive relief operation often struggled to reach devastated towns, and voices that had been crying out from the rubble fell silent.
\n\u201cWe could hear their voices, they were calling for help,\u201d said Ali Silo, whose two relatives could not be saved in the Turkish town of Nurdagi.
\nIn the end, it was left to Silo, a Syrian who arrived from Hama a decade ago, and other residents to recover the bodies and those of two other victims.
\nMonday\u2019s quake cut a swath of destruction that stretched hundreds of kilometers (miles) across southeastern Turkey and neighboring Syria, toppling thousands of buildings and heaping more misery on a region shaped by Syria\u2019s 12-year civil war and refugee crisis.
\nAftershocks then rattled tangled piles of metal and concrete, making the search efforts perilous, while freezing temperatures made them ever more urgent.
\nThe scale of the suffering \u2014 and the accompanying rescue effort \u2014 were staggering.
\nMore than 8,000 people have been pulled from the debris in Turkey alone, and some 380,000 have taken refuge in government shelters or hotels, said Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay. They huddled in shopping malls, stadiums, mosques and community centers, while others spent the night outside in blankets gathering around fires.
\nMany took to social media to plead for assistance for loved ones believed to be trapped under the rubble \u2014 and Turkey\u2019s state-run Anadolu Agency quoted Interior Ministry officials as saying all calls were being \u201ccollected meticulously\u201d and the information relayed to search teams.
\nTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said 13 million of the country\u2019s 85 million were affected in some way \u2014 and declared a state of emergency in 10 provinces in order to manage the response.
\nFor the entire quake-hit area, that number could be as high as 23 million people, according to Adelheid Marschang, a senior emergencies officer with the World Health Organization.
\n\u201cThis is a crisis on top of multiple crises in the affected region,\u201d Marschang said in Geneva.
\nTeams from nearly 30 countries around the world headed for Turkey or Syria.
\nAs promises of help flooded in, Turkey said it would only allow vehicles carrying aid to enter the worst-hit provinces of Kahramanmaras, Adiyaman and Hatay in order to speed the effort.
\nThe United Nations said it was \u201cexploring all avenues\u201d to get supplies to rebel-held northwestern Syria, where millions live in extreme poverty and rely on humanitarian aid to survive.
\nNurgul Atay told The Associated Press she could hear her mother\u2019s voice beneath the rubble of a collapsed building in the Turkish city of Antakya, the capital of Hatay province, but that her and others\u2019 efforts to get into the ruins had been futile without any heavy equipment to help.
\n\u201cIf only we could lift the concrete slab we\u2019d be able to reach her,\u201d she said. \u201cMy mother is 70 years old, she won\u2019t be able to withstand this for long.\u201d
\nBut in the northwestern Syrian town of Jinderis, a young girl called Nour was pulled alive from the wreckage of a collapsed building Monday.
\nA rescuer cradled her head in his hands and tenderly wiped dust from around her eyes as she lay amid crushed concrete and twisted metal before being pulled out and passed to another man.
\nTurkey has large numbers of troops in the border region with Syria and has tasked the military to aid in the rescue efforts, including setting up tents for the homeless and a field hospital in Hatay province. Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said a humanitarian aid brigade based in Ankara and eight military search and rescue teams had also been deployed.
\nA navy ship docked on Tuesday at the province\u2019s port of Iskenderun, where a hospital collapsed, to transport survivors in need of medical care to a nearby city. Thick, black smoke rose from another area of the port, where firefighters have not yet been able to douse a fire that broke out among shipping containers toppled by the earthquake.
\nIn northern Syria, meanwhile, Sebastien Gay, the head of mission in the country for Doctors Without Borders, said health facilities were overwhelmed with medical personnel working around \u201caround the clock to respond to the huge numbers of wounded.\u201d (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NURDAGI, 7 Feb: Search teams and emergency aid from around the world poured into Turkey and Syria on Tuesday as rescuers working in freezing temperatures dug \u2014 sometimes with their bare hands \u2014 through the remains of buildings flattened by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. The death toll soared above 5,000 and was still expected to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-210432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}