Three people, including a child, were found alive this Saturday under rubble in the Turkish city of Antioch, capital of Hatay province, 13 days after the earthquake that also shook Syria on February 6.
According to the AP agency, the survivors were transferred in ambulances after 296 hours buried under the Kanatli apartment block, in the center of the city, located in southern Turkey. The report itself indicates that the images of the rescue showed doctors placing an intravenous line in the arm of the man, who was lying on a stretcher.
The state agency Anadolu later identified them as Samir Muhammed Accar, 49; his wife Ragda, 40, and his son, 12, who later died at a hospital. The bodies of two other children were also found in the rubble, according to reports citing a Kyrgyz rescue team.
On Friday, in the same town, a 45-year-old man had been found who had spent 278 hours under the rubble.
In general terms, there is less and less hope of finding survivors in the towns near the epicenter of the telluric movement, further north. In these regions there was snowfall and the temperature reaches 15 degrees below zero at night, according to the AFP news agency.
However, Ali Ihsan Ökten, vice president of the Turkish Medical Association, assured the DPA agency that it was precisely the weather conditions that allowed the finding of survivors so many days after the event. The specialist explained that metabolism slows down with cold. In summer, people would not have been able to survive that long without water.
According to the latest official balances, the official count of fatalities in Turkey after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake amounted to 39,672, which brings the total death toll to 43,360 adding the deaths in Syria.
