Two women rescued from the rubble 122 hours after the earthquakes in Turkey

Turkey’s emergency services have managed to get a 70-year-old woman and another 55-year-old woman alive about 122 hours after being buried under the rubble of two destroyed buildings in the cities of Kahramanmaras and Diyarbakir, all after the earthquakes registered Monday in the south of the countrynear the border with Syria.

After an intensive effort by the Turkish search teams in the city of Kahramanmaras, Violet Tabak, 70, has been rescued from the ruins of a building located in the Onikisubat district after 112 hours trappedbefore being transferred to a hospital to receive medical attention, as reported by the Turkish state news agency, Anatolia.

And at that same time, but 400 kilometers to the east, in the city of Diyarbakir, a 55-year-old woman was being pulled out from under the rubble of the destroyed building in which she had spent more than five days locked up. Thus, the rescue work carried out for hours by the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) and other Turkish emergency services in the Yenisehir district has led them to rescue Masallah Çiçek, who had multiple injuries and has been taken to a medical center.

On the sixth day since the earthquakes, emergency services continue looking for living people to rescuea task that becomes more difficult with each hour that passes, since the standard time that a human being can go without the intake of water or food in disasters like this is 72 hours.

The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), under the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, has indicated that close to 160,000 search team members and rescue –including international teams and NGOs– are working in the affected areas.

Large amounts of rescue equipment, meals, basic necessities and psychosocial support groups have been sent to the region. The earthquake has caused more than 20,000 dead in Turkey and almost 3,500 between the figures offered by the health authorities of the Government of Bashar al Assad and those of the rebels in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo (northwest), according to various balances published in recent hours.

They denounce that aid does not reach many small Turkish towns

Aid and rescue teams have focused on the big cities after the earthquake, but in Turkey there are a large number of small towns where no help has yet reached. The devastating earthquake last Monday shook a huge area of ​​south-eastern Turkey, from a size greater than the surface of Portugaland the high degree of destruction, including basic infrastructure, hinders the distribution of aid.

In addition, the newspaper ‘Hurriyet’ reports this Saturday that many of the roads leading to rural villages in the region are closed due to snowfall. In this sense, the poor condition of many mountain roads even before the earthquake complicates communications. “Perhaps it is insufficient but state aid and that of volunteers reached the cities, but almost nothing has reached thousands of towns where people are struggling to survive,” Yilmaz Kurt, an emergency medical specialist, explained to EFE.