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
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