In Kharamanmaras, in southern Turkey, the race against time continues to find possible survivors under the rubble. In the devastated city, the inhabitants try to keep hope despite the cold. Report by our special correspondent in Turkey, Assiya Hamza.
They are there, seated on sofas in the middle of a field of ruins. Women, groggy with the cold, try to warm themselves in front of an improvised fire. Some are wrapped in blankets. They are waiting. A child, a husband, a brother, a mother. Around them, the backhoes are activated in a great crash of sheet metal and mud. Because the race against time has begun in Kharamanmaras, in the southeast of Turkey, to find possible survivors.
Near the epicenter of the earthquake, whose last assessment, Tuesday, February 7, reported 5,430 dead and 32,000 injured in Turkey according to the Minister of Health, there is nothing or almost nothing left. The buildings seem to have been literally blown away by the violence of this earthquake. Scattered in small clusters, men sometimes try to find survivors with their bare hands in these piles of concrete and scrap metal.
I have never seen this in my life
“There is a woman under the rubble. She is screaming, says Orhan Kusun, an Iraqi refugee living in Kharamanmaras, who came to take part in the rescue operations. There are many children and families under the rubble. is a huge disaster. I’ve never seen that in my life”.
Covered with a simple black hoodie despite the temperatures well below zero, Orhan Kusun is active with ardor. “Half the city is reduced to dust. I saw children fall from buildings and land on the ground. It was horror, he continues. I live here. I was in the street when I saw the buildings moving from left to right”.
The forties with the black beard did not hesitate. “I started to help people and I saved 15 people. For the rest it’s hard. We need humanitarian aid, and groups of volunteers to help us. The city is very big. There are many neighborhoods affected,” insists the man who fled the war in Iraq.
Suddenly, men who were busy on the roof of a devastated building on the other side of the muddy ground, descend the corrugated red sheet. They hold on each side a blanket from which feet escape. The makeshift stretcher is placed on the ground, a few meters below and covered with a white sheet. A second comes to join her a few minutes later. Despite their relentlessness, it was the lifeless bodies of several members of the same family that they pulled out of the rubble of their apartment. Then a dull cry. Bloodcurdling pain. A woman has just picked up the laundry. Squatting in front of the remains, she recognized her own. Here, more than 18 people were found dead in the rubble today.
Delivered from the rubble
But the rescuers refused to give up. Despite the increasingly biting cold, they continue to probe each building. “Can anyone hear me?” exclaims a rescuer, a fluorescent headset riveted to his head. Under the rubble, a thin thread of voices will be picked up by the man who moves his microphone centimeter by centimeter in a desperate search for an echo.
As night falls rapidly on Kahramanmaras, the rescuers redouble their agitation. They need cover. After hours of hard but meticulous work, they finally managed to deliver the one they only knew the voice of. Orhan Kusun’s face lights up. The miracle happened. Covered in dust, she appears on the orange stretcher. Cries and tears… of joy this time. Those of her brother and her husband who watched, fear in their stomachs. But also of all the inhabitants who came to immortalize this moment with their smartphones. For each person saved, it is a rekindled hope, however fleeting, for thousands of other families.
But for the reunion, it will still have to wait. The ambulance must evacuate the miraculous towards the nearest hospital. The siren will add to the chorus of horns from other emergency vehicles resounding throughout the city.
