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MALATYA, Turkey - International teams in Turkey’s earthquake-hit city of Malatya continue their search-and-rescue efforts to pull survivors from underneath the rubble despite fading hopes and difficult conditions with unstable buildings complicating their task.
A destructive 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck the city of Kahramanmaras in southern Turkey on Monday dawn, killing around 28,000 people in the country as well as neighboring Syria. The quake has galvanized support for the countries with global nations sending rescue teams to assist with pulling survivors from underneath the rubble of countless collapsed buildings.
The UN relief chief on Saturday warned that the death toll is expected to double and that authorities have not yet started counting the number of fatalities.
In Malatya, Chinese and Palestinian teams were awaiting their counterparts from Turkey’s disaster agency to begin working despite the surviving buildings in unstable condition, posing risks to the rescue workers.
“We have life detectors, cameras, heavy digging equipment here. In the case where we find signs of life, we can rescue and transfer,” Wang Hong Wu of China’s Blue Sky Rescue team told Rudaw’s Roj Eli Zalla on Saturday, expressing solidarity with the country amid difficult conditions.
However, engineers are evaluating the safety of using heavy machinery to uncover the rubble due to the risk of the surrounding buildings collapsing.
The UN warned that at least 870,000 people were in urgent need of hot meals in both countries after the quake, which in Syria alone has killed more than 3,500 people and left around 5.3 million homeless.
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