KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkey/JANDARIS, Syria, Feb 15 – Two women were pulled from the rubble in Turkey’s southern city of Kahramanmaras on Wednesday, even as hopes to find survivors from last week’s devastating earthquake dwindled and the focus switched to giving survivors some relief.
Rescuers could be seen applauding and embracing each other in a video posted to social media as an ambulance carried away a 74-year-old woman rescued after more than nine days trapped in rubble.
Earlier in the day, a 46-year-old woman was rescued in the same city, close to the epicentre of the quake.
The combined death toll in Turkey and Syria has climbed over 41,000, and millions are in need over humanitarian aid, with many survivors having been left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures. Rescues are now few and far between.
In hard-hit Kahramanmaras, where the earthquake forced hundreds of families to live in tents erected in a stadium in freezing temperatures, empty buildings with their walls ripped open showed the power of the earthquake.
With much of the region’s sanitation infrastructure damaged or rendered inoperable by the earthquakes, health authorities face a daunting task in trying to ensure that survivors now remain disease-free.
“We haven’t been able to rinse off since the earthquake,” said Mohammad Emin, a 21-year-old graphic design student, as he carried flu medicine from the clinic of the city’s open-air stadium.
Six toilets at the stadium were not enough to meet demand, he said, while Batyr Berdyklychev, the World Health Organization’s representative in Turkey, has warned that the water shortage in quake-hit areas “increases the risk of waterborne diseases and outbreaks of communicable diseases.”
On a ferry being used to treat survivors in Turkey’s southern port of Iskendurn, pharmacist Jin Ozsaygili also worried about health risks.
“We expect cholera and typhoid epidemics. In order to prevent these diseases, the debris should urgently be removed, calcification and cleaning should be completed, but we are trying our best (to prevent outbreaks) as this is not possible at the moment,” Ozsaygili said.
Meanwhile, the government encouraged people to go back home, if and when authorities have deemed their building safe, “in order to start getting back to normal,” Tourism Minister Nuri Ersoy told a news conference in Malatya, some 160 km (99 miles)from the epicentre of the earthquake.
“We will quickly demolish what needs to be demolished and build safe houses,” Turkey’s Environment and Urbanisation Minister Murat Kurum tweeted.
Across the border, in Syria, relief efforts have been hampered by a civil war that has splintered the country and divided regional and global powers.
Civil war enmities have obstructed at least two attempts to send aid across frontlines into the hard-hit northwest, but an aid convoy reached the area overnight.
Organised by Arab tribes, trucks loaded with blankets, food, medical supplies and tents arrived overnight in the insurgent-held rebel northwest from a region controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, a Reuters witness saw.
More aid was being collected, said Hamoud Saleh al-Darjah, an organiser. “This isn’t the last campaign,” he said.
But some in the region worried about how they could start again.
“The situation is really tragic,” Abdulrahman Mohammad, a displaced Syrian originally from the neighbouring province of Aleppo, said in Idlib, where many had found refuge in the past decade from other war-torn provinces.
Parts of the provinces of Idlib and adjacent Aleppo held by Turkey-backed rebels suffered the bulk of the quake’s casualties in Syria: over 4,400 of a death toll of more than 5,800, according to the United Nations and government authorities.
“Anyone who is working as a labourer and renting a house… If you need $10 a day in expenses and you can barely get that – how are you supposed to rebuild?” Mohammad, originally from Aleppo, said.
Hassan Mohamed, a civil defence volunteer, said that while efforts to find survivors in the most badly hit areas in northwest Syria had finished, rescue workers were still deploying in response to reports of people missing. “We are also going to areas where there has been no internet,” he said.
Some have had lucky escapes.
In Syria’s Mediterranean town of Jableh, Um Kanan recounts how she woke her three children and rushed them to a small closet in her bedroom for shelter, along with a collection of family photos and documents, when the earthquake hit.
The force of the quake brought their fourth floor apartment in crashing to the ground, but the four survived.
“I kept thinking to myself: ‘Can it be? Did the building just fall down? Is this a dream?’ I tried to move but I couldn’t,” she said. “The children and I, by some miracle, we ended up in this small space that I had left empty.”