SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS ENTERS FINAL HOURS

Tue 14 February 2023:

The desperate searches for earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria are entering their final hours, with experts saying the window for rescues has nearly closed given the length of time that has passed and the severity of the building collapses.

Eduardo Reinoso Angulo, a professor at the Institute of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The Associated Press news agency that the likelihood of finding people alive was “very, very small now”.

David Alexander, a professor of emergency planning and management at University College London, agreed, saying the odds were not very good to begin with. Many of the buildings were so poorly constructed that they collapsed into very small pieces, leaving very few spaces large enough for people to survive in, he told AP.

“If a frame building of some kind goes over, generally speaking we do find open spaces in a heap of rubble where we can tunnel in,“ Alexander said. “Looking at some of these photographs from Turkey and from Syria, there just aren’t the spaces.”

Winter conditions have also reduced the window for survival.

In the cold, the body shivers to keep warm, but that burns a lot of calories, meaning that people also deprived of food will die more quickly, said Dr Stephanie Lareau, a professor of emergency medicine at Virginia Tech in the United States.

Excavators start removing debris in Turkey’s Hatay

Excavators have begun removing debris from an urban area in Turkey’s hard-hit Hatay province, drone footage showed, as the operation to find survivors started drawing to a close.

Several large hydraulic excavators near the city of Antakya scraped at piles of masonry or knocked down the tops of teetering concrete buildings, footage showed on Monday, with clouds of dust rising from the rubble as slabs of concrete fell.

Workers in high-visibility jackets dotted the desolate expanse of what was once a residential area while a few clusters of onlookers watched from a safe distance.

White Helmets say search efforts for quake survivors in northwest Syria about to end

Search operations for more survivors beneath the rubble are about to end in the opposition north west of Syria eight days after the devastating earthquake, the White Helmets main rescue group has said.

“It’s about to come to a close. The indications we have are that there are not any (survivors), but we are trying to do our final checks and on all sites,” said Raed al Saleh who heads the White Helmets group that has carried out the major rescue operations in the devastated region.

The group, which has rescue workers across the region where whole neighbourhoods and villages were wiped out, said they were also collecting names of the missing people in the enclave where the group’s latest death toll stood at 3,167 with thousands injured in the opposition-controlled areas.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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