Dramatic calls for help: victims report via mobile phones and social media

Major earthquake in Turkey
Dramatic calls for help: victims report via mobile phones and social media

Rescue workers remove an earthquake victim on a stretcher from a collapsed building in the Turkish city of Adana

© DPA

Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people have been buried under collapsed houses and buildings after the earthquake in Turkey. Many who are still alive are using their cellphones to call for help on social media.

The severe earthquake in south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria will probably end up claiming thousands of lives. The rescue measures are running at full speed, international help has been promised. The images from the region around the Turkish cities of Gaziantep and Kahramanmaraş, where the epicenter of the earthquake was, and Aleppo in Syria are dramatic. Photos and videos sometimes show whole streets in ruins.

It’s a race against time for the rescuers to rescue survivors alive from under the rubble of collapsed houses and buildings. Victims apparently send calls for help on their cell phones on social media in order to be found and located, and numerous users continue to spread the calls for help.

Dramatic images under rubble

Turkish rock musician Haluk Levent shared the call for help from a woman from the city of Antakya in Hatay province on Twitter. The woman named was buried under rubble, as a photo suggests. Under her cry for help she writes: “Save me!”. She also presumably made two videos showing other buried people who survived.

In order not to jeopardize calls for help, the authorities asked the people in Turkey to make phone calls online and not via the mobile phone network because of the communication bottlenecks, so that those who were buried can be reached first. The temperatures in the affected areas are currently often in the minus range. In some places it snowed heavily. Everywhere in the disaster area, rescue workers sometimes searched the rubble with their bare hands for people who were buried, as pictures show.

Search partly with bare hands

“Seven members of my family are still under the rubble,” survivor Muhittin Orakci told AFP in Diyarbakir. In the city alone, which is mostly inhabited by Kurds, around 200 people are believed to be buried under the rubble of a collapsed building, a representative of the rescue teams told the Turkish broadcaster NTV.

The situation in northern Syria is similarly dramatic. There, too, buildings collapsed in numerous cities. Rescue teams tried to pull people out of the rubble throughout the night and dawn and the death toll is rising every hour.

Sources: DPA “NDR info” “Mercury

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