Rescue teams in Turkey have pulled five members of a single family alive from the wreckage of their home, 129 hours after a powerful earthquake struck the region. Rescuers on Saturday first extricated mother and daugher Havva and Fatmagul Aslan from among a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdag, in Gaziantep province, HaberTurk reported.
The teams later reached the father, Hasan Aslan, but the man insisted that his other daughter, Zeynep, and son Saltik Bugra be saved first, the station said. Hasan was brought out last. Rescuers cheered and chanted “God is Great!” as the man was transported into an ambulance.
Rescue teams using thermal cameras to locate signs of life continued to pull out survivors out of mounds of rubble Saturday, five days after a major earthquake struck a sprawling border region of Turkey and Syria. The death toll, however, was approaching 25,000.
At least four more people were rescued early Saturday. They included a disoriented 16-year-old saved from under rubble 119 hours after the huge quake struck and a 70-year-old woman who was rescued three hours later.
“What day is it?” Kamil Can Agas, the teenager who was pulled out of the rubble in Kahramanmaras asked his rescuers, according to NTV television. Members of the mixed Turkish and Kyrgyz search teams embraced each other, as did the teenager’s cousins, with one of them calling out: “He is out, brother. He is out. He is here.”
The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake collapsed thousands of buildings, killing more than 24,000 people, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless. Another quake nearly equal in power and likely triggered by the first caused more destruction hours later.
