Shocking images taken from a drone showed massive cracks in a road in Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter of the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria a week ago.
The Turkish town was one of the hardest hit by the quake. There they settled 30,000 tents and there are 48,000 victims in schools and another 11,500 people housed in sports centers.
In kahramanmaras there are hundreds of teams rescuers deployed, but in seven areas of the province the lifeguards finished their work.
Continue the search for survivors
meanwhile using thermal cameras and shovels, rescuers were still searching Monday for at least two survivors in the ruins of a damaged building.
“We saw them yesterday, we saw them today, they are still alive, they are still in very good condition,” he told Reuters the head of Turkey’s volunteer health care team, Burcu Baldovand added: “It is already a miracle.”
For more than 24 hours, rescuers have been working on the careful removal of debrisdeepening its tunnel and thus gradually closing in on the survivors.
“The building inside is very dangerous collapsed… So in Turkey we say that we are ‘digging with the nails‘, one by one, slowly, slowly, slowly,” Baldov said.
The confirmed balance of the earthquake is 35,224 dead31,643 in Turkey and 3,581 in Syria, making this cataclysm the fifth deadliest since the beginning of the 21st century.
The UN denounced the failure to send aid to Syria, a country already devastated by more than a decade of war.
In Syria, the death toll has remained stable for days, so the balance may rise and with each passing day the chances of finding survivors decrease.
Destroyed places of worship
The Turkish city of antakyaan ancient town, known as antioch in Antiquity, it was also devastated and the earthquake demolished the oldest mosque in the country.
“This place has a very important meaning for us,” he said with a sigh. Havva Pamukcu. “It was a precious place for all of us, Turks and Muslims. People used to come here before making the pilgrimage to Mecca.”
A few meters away, an Orthodox church founded in the 14th century – and rebuilt in 1870 after a previous earthquake – lost all its walls.
In the city, debris removal teams began work and installed emergency toilets, and a reporter from the AFP He said that the telephone signal returned.
Antakya is patrolled by a large contingent of police and military to prevent looting that occurred over the weekend.
Turkish Vice President fuat oktaysaid on Sunday that 108,000 buildings were damaged in the entire area affected by the quake and that 1.2 million people are being housed in student rooms and 400,000 homeless people have been evacuated from the region.
In Turkey, outrage is growing over the poor quality of the buildings and the government response.
(With information from Reuters and AFP)
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Source-www.infobae.com