Death toll from Turkey -Syria earthquakes tops 34 000

It had been nearly a week since a pair of powerful earthquakes shattered this town in southern Turkey, and families with missing loved ones were out again — as they had been each day before — to follow the painstaking search for survivors. Men and women watched rescue workers from the rooftops, shouting out advice as teams drilled cautiously through unexcavated rooms. “That’s his bedroom right in there,” one man cried out. “It’s that one.”

It took workers hours to reach the man in question, cutting rebar away from his large body frame. Then they rolled him into a black body bag.

It was a scene repeated across southern Turkey and northwest Syria on Sunday, where the death toll from the quakes eclipsed 34,000 people, as hopes waned that more survivors might be pulled from the rubble and the United Nations said aid efforts had “failed” the people of northwest Syria.

Nearly a week after the February 6 earthquakes, rescue efforts in several areas shifted to recovery missions. More than 1.1m people were displaced in Türkiye. An untold number lay buried under the rubble. In Syria, a scarcity of excavators left people desperately digging for loved ones on their own.

Across quake-destroyed areas, the enormity of the needs was hard to comprehend. We have not seen suffering and devastation of this scale in over a decade,” Johan Mooij, the response director for World Vision Syria, said. “The impact is so enormous it could take a generation for survivors to recover.

Source: Reuters

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