Rescuers on Saturday pulled five members of a single family alive from the wreckage of their home, 129 hours after the quake
Rescue teams in Turkey on Saturday pulled to safety a family of five who survived inside their collapsed home for five days following a major earthquake in a sprawling border region of Turkey and Syria. The death toll, however, was approaching 25,000.
The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake collapsed thousands of buildings, killing more than 24,500 people, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless. Another quake nearly equal in power and likely triggered by the first caused more destruction hours later.
One man, Sukru Canbulat, was wheeled into the hospital in a wheelchair, his left leg badly injured with deep bruising, contusions and lacerations. The hundreds of graves, spaced no more than three feet apart, were marked with simple wooden planks set vertically in the ground. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting quake-stricken Diyarbakir, said universities would switch to long-distance education until the summer, to free up state-run dormitories for survivors left homeless.
The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.
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