“You need at least machines to have the chance to devise a plan in a place where there’s a lot of space to move,” he said, referring to the lack of heavy machinery like bulldozers and diggers required to move big blocks of concrete.
Those trapped could even survive for two weeks if given water and food while rescuers dig them out, he added.
The 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes — and many aftershocks — hit southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on Feb 6. Officials have said this is the worst natural disaster to hit the region in a century.
Yehor Tuprunov, another rescuer, arrived in Antakya from war-torn Ukraine. His team had just recovered bodies of a Syrian refugee family who fled to Turkey in 2015 after their home was bombed by the Russians, he said.
“It’s same like in Ukraine because you have destroyed buildings, so many bodies. We feel this problem in Turkey, that’s why we came from Ukraine to this place,” he said.
With hopes for additional survivors dimming with each passing hour, focus turned to helping those who survived, with tons of critical humanitarian aid and response teams arriving in Turkey.
So far, the U.S. Air Force had delivered more than 5,700 tons of life-saving equipment and disaster aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development said Sunday.
But in the sanction-hit Syria, aid delivery been hampered by a decade-long civil war and the availability of only a single border crossing for U.N. aid delivery.
“We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned,” the U.N. agency’s relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said Sunday in a tweet after his visit to the Turkish side of the crossing.
The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfields urged the U.N. Security Council on Sunday to approve two additional crossings for the delivery of lifesaving aid.
“People in the affected areas are counting on us. They are appealing to our common humanity to help in their moment of need,” Thomas-Greenfields said in a statement Sunday.
Speaking from the Syrian capital of Damascus, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “The compounding crises of conflict, Covid, cholera, economic decline and now the earthquake have taken an unbearable toll.”
Kelly Cobiella reported from Antakya, and Mithil Aggarwal from Hong Kong.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
