They rescued a teenager who spent 250 hours under the rubble in Kahramanmaras, Turkey https://t.co/QgOkmD7tuO pic.twitter.com/PkkDxDtgd8
– Telam Agency (@AgenciaTelam) February 16, 2023
Turkish rescue workers rescued a 17-year-old girl from the rubble of a collapsed building on Thursday, almost 250 hours after the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria last Monday. As they assured, there is less and less hope of finding survivors, local authorities reported.
After an intense effort by Turkish search teams, Aleyna Olmez was rescued 11 days after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck, which killed nearly 40,000 people in southeastern Turkey and Syria.
“She seemed fine. She opened and closed her eyes”said Ali Akdogan, a miner who participated in the rescue work in Kahramanmaras, a city near the epicenter of the quake.
The girl’s uncle, while crying, hugged all the rescuers one by one while exclaiming that “we will never forget them,” the AFP news agency reported.
“We’ve been working here, in this building, for a week now. We came here hoping to hear something.”said the miner, while expressing his “joy” to find people and even pets alive.
According to the latest balances from the authorities and doctors, at least 36,187 people died in Turkey and 3,688 in Syria due to the earthquake and its aftershocks, reaching a confirmed total balance of 39,875 deaths.
After 11 days of searching, the emergency services continue to search for people to rescue, a task that becomes more difficult with each passing hour, while Turkey has already suspended rescue efforts in some regions.
For its part, the government of Syria, a territory at war, took the same measure in areas under its control, AFP reported.
In the areas that remain active, teams from France, Australia, Spain, Romania and Argentina, among others, collaborate in rescue and humanitarian aid tasks.
The group that Argentina sent to Turkey managed to save three people alive yesterday in the town of Hatay, one of the most devastated in Turkish territory, a fact that the brigade members described as “a miracle after so many days of the earthquake.”
