The death toll from the earthquake in Turkey and Syria continues to rise, but even five days after the disaster, rescue workers are still recovering a few survivors. The authorities are now counting 20,213 dead and 80,052 injured in Turkey alone, as the Ministry of Health announced on Friday.
Initially, countless people were rescued from the rubble of collapsed buildings, but helpers are now recovering almost nothing but corpses: According to Vice President Fuat Oktay, only 67 people across the country have been pulled alive from the rubble in the past 24 hours. But they still exist, the touching individual fates with happy endings.
The rescue workers in Kahramanmaras pulled a 46-year-old man out of the ruins of a seven-story building 112 hours after the quake, the state news agency Anadolu reported. In the province of Gaziantep, a pregnant woman was brought back to daylight after 115 anxious hours. Also in Gaziantep, helpers rescued a nine-year-old girl from the rubble after 108 hours – but her two parents and her sister were already dead.
A 7.7-magnitude tremor shook the Turkish-Syrian border area early Monday morning, before another 7.6-magnitude quake followed at noon. Since people can only rarely survive longer than three days without water and the number of missing persons is still very high, it is to be feared that the number of victims will increase drastically.