Victims Resist: Rescuers Still Saving Lives 100 Hours After Earthquakes

Panic and hopelessness engulf Turkey and Syria four days after the earthquakes that have devastated both countries, leaving thousands dead and injured, and many other thousands of disappeared. Yet still there is room for hope. This has been demonstrated by the many victims trapped in the rubble of completely destroyed buildings who, almost 100 hours after the earthquake, are still being rescued alive; also, the relief teams, who do not give up in their efforts to save as many people as possible in a race against time.

Proof of this is little Hilal Bilgi. This ten-year-old girl has been found alive in the ruins of a seven-story apartment more than 90 hours after the first tremors. To get her out of there, they had to amputate the girl’s right arm, which was under a concrete block that it was decided not to remove so as not to put Hilal at greater risk. However, the troops have determined that her parents and her three brothers lost their lives while trying to escape during the earthquake, according to Turkish media reports.

In any case, for the rescuers it has been a success story at a limit time for the rescue work, which continues to be carried out. Because Hilal’s is not the only example. The emergency services have managed to get a mother and her ten year old son after carrying 101 hours trapped under the rubble in the Turkish city. After hours of work removing debris from a collapsed building in the Mevlana Halit Mahallesi district, search and rescue teams have found Sebahat Varli, 32, and his ten-year-old son Serhat.

In the last few hours, multiple people who were still alive, although buried among the ruins of an unrecognizable country, have been found and rescued in other regions of the country. A family of five people has been rescued in Hatay and taken to hospital 88 hours after the catastrophe, as well as a father, a police officer, and his four-year-old son, also in Hatay. More than 80 hours after the earthquakes, two brothers trapped in the ruins of their home in Ankara, and a nine-year-old girl, have been saved.

In Kahramanmaras, it has been rescued 86 hours later from the earthquakes to a 24-year-old nurse, a 46-year-old woman who was still holding her cat in her arms, another woman with her son or a married couple who showed their happiness while being transferred on a stretcher to a hospital; in Malatya, a 29-year-old man, two minors and his aunt, and another girl who, after losing his mother and two older sisters and being rescued, she asked the rescuers where she would go now.

End of rescue work

The standard time that a person can remain alive without ingesting water or food in disasters like this is 72 hours, so, after that time, the work of the emergency services to rescue people is considerably complicated. people alive from under the rubble. This has caused the more than 120,000 members of the search and rescue teams work with urgencyor in the affected areas before the authorities conclude these tasks.

Even so, despite the success stories registered in the last few hours, the few hopes that remained before the deadliest earthquake in almost more than a century in Turkey. Already around dawn this Thursday, the Turkish Vice President, Fuat Oktay, announced that the search for survivors was terminated in the provinces of Sanliurfa and Kilis, and that they are almost finished in Diyarbakır, Osmaniye and Adana. Likewise, it is expected that in the next few hours these tasks will be completed in the rest of the affected territories.