Turkey quake death toll reaches over 200, set to rise
More than 200 people were killed and hundreds more feared dead on Monday after an earthquake struck parts of southeast Turkey, where rescue teams worked through the night to try to free survivors crying for help from under rubble.
Survivors and emergency service workers searched frantically through mounds of smashed concrete and other debris with shovels and their bare hands after the 7.2 magnitude quake toppled buildings and some roads on Sunday.
In the badly hit town of Ercis, rescuers tried to free one young boy, aged about 10, pinned beneath a concrete slab.
“Be patient, be patient,” they pleaded as the boy whimpered. The lifeless hand of an adult, with a wedding ring, was visible just a few centimeters (inches) in front of his face.
Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said the quake had killed 120 people in the town and 100 more in the city of Van, some 100 km (60 miles) further south. The toll was expected to rise.
Sahin, who is overseeing emergency operations in Ercis, said 1,090 people had been wounded while hundreds more were unaccounted for.
Rescue efforts were hampered by power outages after the quake brought down power cables to towns and villages across much of the barren Anatolian steppe near the Iranian border.
As dawn broke the scale of devastation was clear.
At one crumpled four-storey building in Ercis, a team of firemen from the largest southeastern city of Diyarbakir tried to reach four children believed trapped deep in an apartment block.
Rescue workers carried two black body bags to a waiting ambulance, one of them small, apparently containing that of a child. An old woman wrapped in a headscarf walked alongside sobbing.
A man paced back and forth sobbing before running toward the rescue workers on top of the rubble. “That’s my nephew’s house,” the man sobbed as workers tried to hold him back.
A group of women, some of their faces covered by their headscarves wept as they looked on.
Nearby, aid teams handed out parcels of bread and food, while people wrapped in blankets huddled around open fires after spending a cold night on the streets.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said there were an unknown number of people unaccounted for under the collapsed buildings of the stricken towns, and he feared the worst for villagers living in outlying rural areas, who had yet to be reached.
“Because the buildings are made of adobe, they are more vulnerable to quakes. I must say that almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed,” Erdogan told a televised news conference in Van on Monday shortly after midnight.
More than 100 aftershocks have jolted the region in the hours since the quake struck for around 25 seconds at 1041 GMT (6:41 a.m. EDT) on Sunday…