ERCIS, Turkey – Rescuers pulled a two-week-old baby girl alive from the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block yesterday as they battled to find survivors from a earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed at least 432 people and left thousands homeless.
The baby’s mother and a grandmother were also brought out alive on stretchers to jubilant cries from onlookers, who followed the dramatic rescue under cold, pouring rain.
Hope of finding more people alive under tonnes of rubble faded with every passing hour as rescuers pulled out more bodies.
The death toll from the 7.2-magnitude quake rose to 432, from an earlier 366, the Disaster and Emergency Administration said. The final count was likely to rise further as many people were still missing and 2,262 buildings had collapsed.
Thousands slept for a second night in crowded tents or huddled around fires and in cars across a region rattled by aftershocks in Van province, near the Iranian border.
The centre of Van, a city of one million, resembled a ghost town, and in the hard-hit town of Ercis thousands of people roamed the streets.
With victims accusing the central government of being slow in delivering aid to a region inhabited mostly by minority Kurds, Ankara said it was sending more tents and blankets. In some distribution centres, fighting broke out among desperate victims to grab tents from overwhelmed aid workers.
The prime minister’s Disaster and Emergency Administration said priority should be given to delivering tents, blankets, sleeping bags, water and food to the victims.
Electricity cuts have hampered rescue efforts, and there are worries about the weather with winter snows less than a month away.
“We have no tents. Everybody is living outdoors. Van has collapsed psychologically. Life has stopped. Tens of thousands are on the streets. Everybody is in panic,” Kemal Balci, a construction worker, said as he awaited news on friends injured in the quake at a hospital in Van.
“If the government doesn’t give a hand to Van it will be like Afghanistan. Van has been pushed back 100 years.”
The quake, Turkey’s most powerful in a decade, is one more affliction for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in impoverished southeast Turkey, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.
The Turkish Red Crescent has said it is preparing temporary shelter for about 40,000 people, although there are still no reliable figures for the number of people made homeless. – (Reuters)