Nearly a week after the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria, although rescue operations are still urgently deployed, the chances of finding more survivors are ‘thinner’. .
Rescuers are racing against time to find more survivors under the rubble nearly a week after the devastating earthquake, while Turkish authorities are still trying to maintain order throughout the disaster area. and initiate legal action against the collapsed buildings. Experts fear the death toll will continue to rise as the weather turns cold and the time since the quake struck has passed the 72-hour mark – a timeline considered by disaster experts to be the length of time most likely to save lives. The United Nations warned that the final number could be “doubled or more”.
Many people are fortunate to have survived the earthquake in Turkey, but are still living in grief and haunted by the sudden death of many loved ones. The earthquake also buried all the property of many people.
“For better or worse, all we have is here. Even my children are crying now. They say ‘mom, everything is gone, our childhood is gone, our memories are gone’,” said one earthquake survivor.
“My shop, my workplace, everything was destroyed, my house was destroyed. I have a warehouse and it’s gone too, now I have nothing left. Everything is gone and we are left on the street,” another shared.
While rescue operations were suspended in some locations due to weather conditions and excavators began to be deployed to clear debris, hope of finding survivors “is fading away”. ” with many loved ones still waiting by the ruins. For those who are lucky to survive, life is also very difficult when they have completely lost contact, unable to access tents, fireplaces, food and other necessities even after 6 days have passed.
When the temperature drops to minus 10 degrees Celsius at night, many people have to sleep in their cars. Many residents said that they even had to collect firewood from the rubble and burn it for heating, they did not have money to buy anything because all their possessions were buried in the rubble.
Ms. Aslihan Kavasoglu and some family members who also live in the city park of Antakya, Turkey, shared: “I lost my mother, two sisters and brother in the earthquake. Please save us from here, we have nowhere to go, we don’t know how to get out of here now.”
The quake ranks as the sixth deadliest natural disaster in the world this century, with the death toll exceeding 31,000 in an earthquake in neighboring Iran in 2003.