Trapped 17-year-old rescued 10 days after Turkey earthquake

A 17-year-old girl has been rescued after 10 days trapped under rubble in Turkey’s Kahramanmaras province.

 
As the death toll from the devastating earthquake in the country and neighbouring Syria surpassed 42,000.

The girl was extracted from the ruins of a collapsed apartment bloc, before being covered in a gold thermal blanket and carried away, 248 hours after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck in the dead of night on February 6.

Huseyin Berber, a 62-year-old diabetic man, was rescued Wednesday in the southern coastal city of Mersin.

He survived nine days under the rubble of his home by drinking his own urine.

“Finally, I saw that a hole in the debris. When I heard the sounds of rescuers, I shouted too. I shouted so loud that they heard my voice. Someone reached their hand out and it met with my hand. After that, they pulled me out from there.”

But such rescues have become increasingly rare, leaving sorrow to mount as hope dies.

Neither Turkey nor Syria have said how many people are missing.

For families still waiting to retrieve their lost relatives, there is growing anger over what they see as corrupt building practices and deeply flawed urban development that resulted in thousands of homes and businesses disintegrating.

Across the border in Syria, the earthquake slammed a region divided and devastated by 12 years of civil war.

The aid effort has been hampered by the conflict there and many people in the rebel-held northwest feel abandoned as relief supplies since the quake have almost invariably headed to other parts of the sprawling disaster zone.

Fifteen Qatari aid trucks arrived in the rebel-held town of Afrin to offer some relief, bringing desperately needed food, medicines and tents.