RESCUE TEAMS in eastern Turkey were working frantically to pull more survivors from the wreckage of dozens of collapsed buildings yesterday following a severe earthquake in which at least 279 people were killed and hundreds of others injured or trapped.
There was increasing concern for tens of thousands of people forced to spend the night outdoors in the mountainous Van region, enduring near-freezing temperatures, as their damaged homes were shaken by a succession of aftershocks.
“It is a very urgent situation,” said Hakki Erskoy, a disaster manager for the Turkish Red Crescent.
He said his organisation was dealing with 40,000 homeless people, adding: “Right now, we are facing a race against time to provide shelter for people.”
The 7.2 magnitude quake, which struck on Sunday morning, had the most severe effect in Ercis, a town of about 75,000 people, where an estimated 80 multi-storey buildings collapsed.
The provincial capital, Van, about 100km (62 miles) to the south, also suffered substantial damage, and the situation is bad in many surrounding villages.
According to Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who toured the region by helicopter, virtually all mud-brick homes had collapsed. “Because the buildings are made of mud brick, they are more vulnerable to quakes,” he told a late-night press conference in Van. “I must say that almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed.”
While official death tolls given by government ministers varied, even the higher figure of about 270 is likely to rise substantially as bodies are gradually removed from the rubble.
Rescue teams used diggers and cranes to remove bigger pieces of debris before going through wreckage using picks, bars and their bare hands, working through the night under floodlights.
One report said 24 people had been pulled from rubble alive in two hours during the first morning after the quake. While this slowed, there were still successes.
Often, rescuers were led to survivors by mobile phone calls. One man, Yalcin Akay, was saved from a collapsed six-storey building in Ercis after he called an emergency line and described his location, the Anatolia news agency reported.
Three other people, including two children, were rescued from the building.
Witnesses watched a woman and her daughter being painstakingly released from beneath a concrete slab. “I’m here, I’m here,” the woman called to rescuers.
Others had to wait and hope. One woman at another building in Ercis said she had spoken to a fellow teacher six hours after the quake. “She’s my friend, and she called me to say that she’s alive and she’s stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building,” she said. “She told me she was wearing red pyjamas.”
One particularly urgent search was centred around a collapsed student dormitory in Ercis. “University students are said to be living here,” Mustafa Bilgin, a mine rescue expert, said.
“We don’t know how many of them are still inside. We’ve reached their computers, clothing, but we did not see anyone.”
Despite worries about the ease with which so many tall buildings collapsed – shoddy building standards have been blamed for high death tolls in previous Turkish earthquakes – the country’s interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, said the final tally might be lower than initially feared.
“There could be around 100 people [still in the rubble]. It could be more or it could be less,” Mr Sahin said. “But we are not talking about thousands.”
The Red Crescent has set up tented relief camps in two stadiums in Ercis and is distributing tents to those who prefer to remain near their homes. The organisation is also handing out supplies such as blankets, sleeping bags and heaters.
A number of countries have offered assistance with both relief aid and search and rescue efforts.
Mr Erdogan said Turkey was able to cope for the time being. – (Guardian service)