Turkish rescuers: Voices still heard under the rubble

 

In what has been hailed as miraculous rescues, in the same region, an 18-year-old boy and a man were pulled out alive from under rubble on Tuesday – a day after rescuers saved a 10-year-old girl.

 

By Tuesday, the death toll had however risen to over 37,000 as more than 9,200 foreign rescue workers helped Turkish teams recover survivors and bodies.

 

But as rescue workers continue to search for survivors, hope is fading fast and some of the focus is now turning to helping the hundreds of thousands of homeless people who are facing freezing temperatures and hunger.

 

For Turkey and Syria, Monday’s earthquake has left them with a dire humanitarian disaster.

 

AFP reported that the Turkish government said at least 1.2 million people have been housed in student residences, more than 206,000 tents have been erected and 400,000 victims evacuated from the devastated areas.

 

In a tent city near the quake’s epicentre in Kahramanmaras, father-of-four Serkan Tatoglu, 41, described how his family was haunted by their losses and that they wait out the aftershocks -of which there have been over 2,000 since Monday’s deadly quake.

 

Speaking to AFP, Tatoglu said his six-year-old son, the youngest, keeps asking: ‘Dad, are we going to die?’”

 

Turkey’s Vice-President Fuat Oktay meanwhile said Tuesday that 574 children pulled from collapsed buildings were found without any surviving parents.

 

Only 76 had been returned to other family members.

 

One voluntary psychologist working in a children’s support centre in hard-hit Hatay province said numerous parents were frantically looking for missing kids. “We receive a barrage of calls about missing children,” Hatice Goz said.

 

Turkey’s employers’ association, Turkonfed, meanwhile reported Monday that the economic cost of the disaster could be as much as US$84.1 billion, with nearly US$71 billion of that for housing.