Monitoring Desk
ANTAKYA: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to press on with rescue efforts more than a week after a massive quake ripped through Turkiye and neighbouring Syria, with an old woman the latest to be pulled from the debris.
The total death toll in Turkiye and Syria has climbed to more than 41,000, and many survivors are enduring freezing temperatures, having been left homeless by the calamity in cities in both countries.
“We will continue our rescue work until we remove the last citizen left under the collapsed buildings,” Erdogan said late on Tuesday after a cabinet meeting.
Damage assessment of affected buildings, of which thousands were destroyed, will be completed in a week, and reconstruction work will begin within months, Erdogan said.
“We will rebuild all the workplaces and houses, destroyed or made uninhabitable by the powerful earthquake, and hand them over to the rightful owners,” the Turkish President added. Over 105,000 people were wounded in the quake, he said, with over 13,000 still being treated in hospital.
Rescue of quake survivors continue amid moving scenes
Overnight, an old woman named Fatma Gungor was pulled alive from the rubble of a seven-story apartment block in Adiyaman, some 212 hours after the first quake, media reports said.
Covered in a gold foil blanket, wearing an oxygen mask, and strapped onto a stretcher, the woman was carried by rescue workers down from the building’s ruins to a waiting ambulance, footage from state broadcaster TRT showed.
Afterward, Gungor’s relatives hugged the rescue workers, comprised of military personnel and the disaster management authority team.
Nine other survivors were rescued in Turkiye on Tuesday as the focus of the relief effort shifted to helping people now struggling without enough food or shelter in the cold.
Erdogan has acknowledged issues in the initial response to the 7.8 magnitude quake that struck early on February 6, but he has said the situation is now under control.
“We are facing one of the biggest natural disasters not only in our country but also in the history of humanity,” Erdogan said.
More than 2.2 million people have left the worst-hit areas already, Erdogan said, and hundreds of thousands of buildings have become uninhabitable.
