Woman Pulled Alive From Rubble, One Week After Turkey Quake

As survival window closes, more people are miraculously rescued after quake
Rescue crews on Monday pulled a 40-year-old woman from the wreckage of a building a week after two powerful earthquakes struck, but reports of rescues are coming less often as the time since the quake reaches the limits of the human body’s ability to survive without water, especially in sub-freezing temperatures. The magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes struck..

Rescuers have pulled a woman alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in Turkey, broadcaster CNN Turk reports, a week after a major earthquake struck Turkey and Syria killing more than 33,000 people.

Sibel Kaya, 40, was rescued on Monday in southern Gaziantep province, some 170 hours after the first of two quakes struck the region, the report said.

Rescue workers in Kahramanmaras had also made contact with three survivors, believed to be a mother, daughter and baby, in the ruins of a building.

With chances of finding more survivors growing more remote, the toll in both countries surpassed 33,000 on Sunday and looked set to keep growing.

It was the deadliest quake in Turkey since 1939.

Ground torn apart by Turkey earthquake is now huge canyon
This drone video shows an olive grove in Turkey ripped apart by last week’s earthquake.

On Sunday, rescue teams from Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus pulled a man alive from a collapsed building in Turkey, about 160 hours after the quake struck, Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations said.

“The work was carried out at night with a risk to life coming from a possible collapse of structures,” the ministry said on the Telegram messaging platform.

In a central district of one of the worst-hit cities, Antakya in southern Turkey, business owners emptied their shops on Sunday to prevent merchandise from being stolen by looters

In ancient Turkish city of Antakya, historic places of worship reduced to rubble after quake
In the ancient Turkish city of Antakya, one of the oldest mosques in the country and the Greek Orthodox Church are reduced to rubble after the massive earthquake. Antakya, a city of around 250,000 people in south-central Turkey, was once the ancient city of Antioch and was a key staging point on the Silk Road.

Residents and aid workers who came from other cities cited worsening security conditions, with widespread accounts of businesses and collapsed homes being robbed.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said the government will deal firmly with looters, as he faces questions over his response to the earthquake ahead of an election scheduled for June.

The quake is now the sixth most deadly natural disaster this century, behind the 2005 tremor that killed at least 73,000 in Pakistan.

A father and daughter, a toddler and a 10-year-old girl were among other survivors pulled from the ruins of collapsed buildings in Turkey on Sunday but such scenes are becoming rare as the number of dead climbed relentlessly.

At a funeral near Reyhanli, veiled women wailed and beat their chests as bodies were unloaded from trucks – some in closed wood coffins, others in uncovered coffins, and still others just wrapped in blankets.

Some residents sought to retrieve what they could from the destruction.

Footage from Syrian hospital shows desperate need for aid
A surgeon who’s been operating on earthquake survivors around the clock shares exclusive footage from within Syria to show the desperate need for medical aid. Meanwhile, a team of doctors from Canada and the U.S. are on their way to help.

In Syria, the disaster hit hardest in the rebel-held north-west, leaving homeless yet again many people who had already been displaced several times by a decade-old civil war.

The region has received little aid compared with government-held areas.

“We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria,” United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said on Twitter from the Turkey-Syria border, where only a single crossing is open for UN aid supplies.

“They rightly feel abandoned,” Mr Griffiths said, adding that he was focused on addressing that swiftly.

The United States called on the Syrian government and all other parties to immediately grant humanitarian access to all those in need.

Earthquake aid from government-held regions into territory controlled by hardline opposition groups has been held up by approval issues with Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which controls much of the region, a UN representative said.

An HTS source in Idlib told Reuters the group would not allow any shipments from government-held areas and that aid would be coming in from Turkey to the north.

The UN hopes to ramp up cross-border operations by opening an additional two border points between Turkey and opposition-held Syria for aid deliveries, spokesman Jens Laerke said.

UN Syria envoy Geir Pedersen said in Damascus the UN was mobilising funding to support Syria.

“We’re trying to tell everyone – put politics aside. This is a time to unite behind a common effort to support the Syrian people,” he said.

The quakes killed 29,605 people in Turkey and more than 4300 in Syria.

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