Race against time to find survivors at epicenter of Türkiye’s massive earthquakes

Rescuers were racing against time and a bitter cold to find survivors in Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of two huge and deadly earthquakes that struck Türkiye and Syria on Monday.

“We have found survivors here, but also corpses. We can’t abandon the search, the next hours will be crucial to find people still alive,” Mehmet, a Turkish rescuer, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

His team was searching for trapped residents under a mound of rubble that used to be the Ebrar apartment complex, flattened by two powerful tremors.

Once in a while, they ask anguished people who gathered around the rubble searching for family members or volunteers to remain completely silent as they listen out for someone to call for help.

Residents were asleep when a magnitude 7.7 quake jolted Kahramanmaras and several other neighboring provinces before dawn.

A second earthquake of magnitude 7.6 struck several hours later, complicating rescue efforts.

“The problem here is that if there are other survivors, they had to endure the cold which can cause hypothermia, and their chances of survival are getting slim,” Mehmet noted.

The rescuer explained that the complex that collapsed like a house made of cards was home to some 120 residents, most of whom are still believed to be under a mass of metal and concrete.

Throughout Monday, dozens of major aftershocks rattled the region.

The latest official death toll from the massive earthquakes in Türkiye stood at 5,894 with 34,810 injuries early Wednesday. Over 6,000 buildings have collapsed, but authorities believe that the actual number is much higher.

Thousands of rescue workers were scattered across the vast quake-hit zone, which covers 10 provinces of Türkiye, home to around 13.5 million people.

But as the quakes have also seriously disrupted the zone’s infrastructure, making highways and roads inaccessible, some cities were left mostly unattended, Xinhua correspondents witnessed.

Rescuers worked through the cold winter night in the hope of being able to find more survivors, but as time went by, the chance of finding people alive was diminishing.

Turkish social media users were also using Twitter to relay to authorities and rescue teams the exact locations of many people who used their cell phones to locate where they were trapped underneath the buildings.

Survivors of the biggest disaster that Türkiye has witnessed for nearly a century were trying to live in their cars as there was no electricity and no other buildings left to accommodate them in Kahramanmaras.

But gasoline was scarce, and heating remained a serious problem, so did drinking water.

In Gaziantep, Adiyaman and Malatya, three provinces hit by the quakes, survivors took shelter in community centers where they were given blankets and food, television channels reported.

Mosques in the region were also opened to provide shelter.

“Because the debris removal efforts are continuing in many buildings in the earthquake zone, we do not know how high the number of dead and injured will rise,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday in a televised address in the capital Ankara.

The World Health Organization warned that the death toll in the two countries could end up surpassing 20,000.

The earthquake-stricken region in Türkiye is also home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war in their homeland.