Rescuers in Turkey pulled two women alive from the rubble of collapsed buildings after they had been trapped for 122 hours (more than five days) after the region’s deadliest quake in two decades, authorities said on Saturday.
The death toll exceeded 24,150 across southern Turkey and northwest Syria a day after Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have reacted faster to Monday’s huge earthquake.
One of the rescued women, Menekse Tabak, 70, was swaddled in a blanket while rescuers carried her to a waiting ambulance in the province of Kahramanmaras, images from state news agency Anadolu showed. The other was an injured 55-year-old, identified as Masallah Cicek, who was extricated from the debris of a collapsed building in Diyarbakir, the largest city in southeast Turkey, the agency said.
Sixty-seven people had been clawed from the rubble in the previous 24 hours, Turkish Vice-President Fuat Oktay told reporters overnight, in efforts that drew in 31,000 rescuers across the affected region.
About 80,000 people were being treated in hospital, while 1.05-million left homeless by the quakes huddled in temporary shelters, he added.
“Our main goal is to ensure that they return to a normal life by delivering permanent housing to them within one year, and that they heal their pain as soon as possible,” Oktay said.
On Friday, Erdogan visited Turkey’s province of Adiyaman, where he acknowledged the government’s response was not as fast as it could have been.
“Though we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be,” he said.
Opponents have seized on the issue to attack Erdogan, who is standing for re-election in a vote set for May 14, though it may be postponed because of the disaster.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of Turkey’s main opposition party, criticised the government response. “The earthquake was huge, but what was much bigger than the earthquake was the lack of co-ordination, lack of planning and incompetence,” he said in a statement.
Teams from dozens of countries were among the rescuers toiling night and day in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings to free buried survivors.
