Rescue workers dug deeper into collapsed buildings yesterday in a battle against time to find survivors from an earthquake in southeast Turkey that killed at least 366 people and left tens of thousands homeless.
As hope of finding people alive under tonens of rubble faded with every passing hour, rescuers pulled out more bodies while residents slept around small fires in towns rattled by aftershocks across Van Province, near the Iranian border.
Five corpses were carried out in body bags from one crumpled building alone in the hard-hit town of Ercis as bystanders wept. Workers used heavy machinery, jackhammers, shovels, pick axes and bare hands to comb through smashed concrete and steel.
Every so often, exhausted rescuers would shout for silence and generators and diggers would stop, straining to hear voices under the wreckage. Seconds later the drone of the machinery would start again.
“Life has become hell. We are outside, the weather is cold. There are no tents,” said Emin Kayram, 53, sitting by a camp fire in the town of Ercis after spending the night with his family of eight in a van parked nearby.
His nephew was trapped in the rubble of a building behind him, where rescue workers had been digging through the night.
“He is 18, a student. He is still stuck in there. This is the third day, but you can’t lose hope. We have to wait here,” he said.
Casualties have been mostly in Ercis and the provincial capital Van. Officials are checking outlying areas.
“It was like judgment day,” said Mesut Ozan Yilmaz, 18, who survived for 32 hours under the rubble of a tea house where he had been passing time with friends.
Unhurt but lying on a hospital bed under a thick blanket, his face blackened by dust and dirt, Yilmaz gave a chilling account to CNN Turk of how he survived by diving under a table.
“The space we had was so narrow. People were fighting for more space to survive,” Yilmaz said. “I rested my head on a dead man’s foot. I know I would be dead now if I had let myself go psychologically.”
Rescue teams concentrated efforts in Ercis, a town of 100,000 that was worst hit by the magnitude 7.2 tremor.
The quake is one more -affliction for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in southeast Turkey, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.
“We escaped from terrorism but now we are faced with an earthquake,” said Osman Bayram, a 26-year-old teacher, who had moved to Van from a more restive part of the southeast.
The centre of Van, a city of 1 million people, resembled a ghost town with no lights in the streets or buildings. Hardly any people could be seen.
The sense of dislocation was even greater in Ercis. With no homes to return to, thousands of people, mostly men, paced the streets, stopping to look at the destruction or whenever there was some commotion at a rescue site.
At one collapsed building on the main road through Ercis, the area worst hit in Sunday’s quake, exhausted rescue workers shouted at crowds of men pushing forward to catch a glimpse as efforts were made to free a woman’s corpse from the rubble.
“Get back. Are you not human? Show some respect. Do we not have any honor or pride?” one rescue worker yelled.
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