Rescue workers yesterday extricated a 70-year-old man from a collapsed building in western Turkey, about 34 hours after a strong earthquake in the Aegean Sea struck Turkey and Greece, killing at least 53 people and injuring more than 900.
It was the latest in a series of remarkable rescues after the Friday afternoon earthquake, which was centered in the Aegean northeast of the Greek island of Samos.
Search-and-rescue teams yesterday were working in nine buildings in the Turkish city of Izmir as day broke.
Photo: AP
Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay raised the death toll in Izmir, the country’s third-largest city, to 51 as rescuers pulled more bodies out of toppled buildings.
He said that 26 badly damaged buildings would be demolished.
“It’s not the earthquake that kills, but buildings,” Oktay said, repeating a common slogan.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) said that nearly 900 people were injured in the nation alone.
Ahmet Citim, 70, was pulled out from the rubble of the eight-story “Riza Bey” building shortly after midnight yesterday morning and was hospitalized.
Turkish Minister of Health Minister Fahrettin Koca wrote in a tweet: “I never lost my hope.”
Earlier on Saturday, rescue teams had lifted teenager Inci Okan out of the same building, along with her dog, Fistik.
“I am very happy. Thankfully my father was not at home. My father couldn’t fit there. He would hurt his head. I am tiny. I am short so I squeezed in and that’s how I was rescued. We stayed home with my dog. Both of us are well,” Okan told reporters from her hospital bed.
Also on Saturday, three young children and their mother were pulled alive from the rubble of another collapsed building in Izmir.
Rescue teams were able to reach 38-year-old Seher Perincek and her three of her four children — aged three, seven and 10-year-old twins, but rescuers were still trying to extract the fourth.
“I’m fine; I was rescued because only one of my feet was pinned. That foot really hurt,” said Elzem Perincek, one of the twins, as she was loaded into an ambulance.
However, Koca said that hours later, one of the children pulled from the rubble had died.
Turkish media reported that three more people were pulled out yesterday from one collapsed apartment building but their conditions were not known.
It was unclear yesterday how many more people remained under the rubble.
AFAD said that more than 5,700 personnel had been activated for rescue work and hundreds of others for food distribution, emergency help and building damage control.
There has been some debate over the magnitude of the earthquake. The US Geological Survey rated it 7, while Istanbul’s Kandilli Institute put it at 6.9 and AFAD said it measured 6.6.
Additional reporting by Reuters
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading