Elderly woman rescued 212 hours after Turkiye quake

ANTAKYA: A 77-year-old woman was rescued during recovery efforts after 212 hours a powerful quake ripped through Turkiye and neighbouring Syria, media reports said on Wednesday.

The woman named Fatma Gungor was pulled alive from the rubble of a seven-storey apartment block in the city of Adiyaman.

Wearing an oxygen mask, covered in a gold foil blanket and strapped onto a stretcher, Gungor was carried by rescue workers down from the ruins of the building to a waiting ambulance, footage from state broadcaster TRT showed.

Afterwards, Gungor’s relatives hugged the rescue team, made up of military personnel and members of the disaster management authority AFAD.

“I’m so excited, I don’t know what to say. We almost got to the point of giving up,” a rescuer at the site told local media and public broadcaster TRT Haber, which has been broadcasting visuals of the rescue missions since last week.

“We didn’t even eat. Thank God it has ended well. I thank both Kocaeli Golcuk Shipyard [workers] and AFAD [rescue team]. So glad we have you.”

Nine other survivors were rescued in Turkiye on Tuesday as the focus of the aid effort shifted to helping people now struggling without shelter or enough food in the cold.

The combined death toll in Turkiye and Syria has climbed over 41,000, and many survivors are enduring near-freezing winter temperatures, having been left homeless by the devastation in cities in both countries.

Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2023