‘Can anybody hear me?’: In Turkey’s quake-hit Kahramanmaras, a desperate hunt for survivors

Issued on: 08/02/2023 – 13:27

Stunned by the tremors and numb from the bitter cold, a group of women huddle around a fire, some wrapped in blankets, motionless shadows in a landscape of desolation. They are waiting for news of a child, a husband or a sibling, buried under a sea of rubble where their homes once stood. All around them, backhoes dig through the debris in a clatter of concrete, metal and mud.

>> Live: Search for survivors intensifies as Turkey-Syria quake death toll tops 8,000

Kahramanmaras lies close to the epicentre of the second powerful quake that rocked southern Turkey and neighbouring Syria before dawn on Monday, flattening towns and cities across a wide area. In Turkey alone, the death toll has risen to more than 8,500 as more and more bodies are pulled from the rubble, with the number of injured in the tens of thousands.

In this sprawling city, with a population of just over one million, the buildings appear to have been blown away by the power of the tremor. Scattered in small groups across the ruins, men are busy digging through the debris, some with their bare hands, looking for survivors trapped under the mass of concrete, bricks, tiles and metal. 

‘I’ve never seen anything like this before’

“There’s a woman under the rubble. She’s crying for help,” says Orhan Kusun, an Iraqi refugee who is helping with the rescue effort, pointing at the ruins of a building knocked down by the quake. “There’s a lot of children and families buried under there,” he adds. “It’s a terrible disaster. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Kusun, who fled the war in his native Iraq, labours tirelessly through the rubble, wearing only a black hoodie despite freezing temperatures that have dropped well below zero degrees Celsius.

“Half the city lies in ruins,” he says. “I was out in the street when the buildings started swerving. I saw children falling to the ground. It was horrific.”

A burly man in his 40s, Kusun was among the first to start digging through the rubble. He says he pulled out 15 people alive. “But the city is big and many neighbourhoods have been affected,” he adds. “We need humanitarian aid and more volunteers to help us.”

As he speaks, a group of men make their way down the twisted roof of a collapsed building, carrying bodies wrapped in sheets. Moments later, a bone-chilling cry of despair rings out as a woman recognises the lifeless bodies of her loved ones.

Hope rekindled

In this area alone, 18 people have been found dead since the start of the day, but rescuers refuse to give up hope even as the temperatures continue to drop. “Can anyone hear me?” shouts one worker, slowly scouring the rubble with a microphone to detect the faintest trickle of a voice.

Suddenly, as night falls on Kahramanmaras, rescuers start movingly frantically, shouting for a blanket. After hours of painstaking work, they have finally reached someone whose voice had echoed through the rubble.

Covered in dust, the woman is carried away on a stretcher amid a chorus of cries and tears – this time of joy – as bystanders seize their phones to capture the moment. Each person pulled out alive rekindles the fading hopes of thousands of others anxiously waiting for news of their loved ones.

But there is little time for rejoicing. As the woman is rushed away in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, the workers soon get back to digging, the siren’s wail joining a deafening chorus of emergency vehicles echoing through the city.

This article has been translated from the original in French.