The death toll from the strong earthquake and aftershocks that hit parts of Turkey and Syria is now over 15,000 as rescuers pulled more survivors from beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings on Thursday.
Hopes were also starting to fade of finding many more people alive more than three days after a catastrophic earthquake and series of aftershocks.
Emergency crews working through the night in the city of Antakya were able to pull a young girl from the ruins of a building and also rescued her father alive two hours later, news agency IHA reported.
In Diyarbakir, east of Antakya, rescuers freed an injured woman from a collapsed building in the early morning hours but found the three people next to her in the rubble dead, the DHA news agency reported.
In addition to 12,873 people killed in Turkey, the country’s disaster management agency said more than 60,000 have been injured. More than 2,900 people have been reported dead on the Syria side of the border.
Meanwhile the recent earthquake and afteshocks s that jolted southeastern Turkey were very large and powerful, according to data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) on Wednesday.
The most powerful earthquake in history shook Chile in 1960 at a magnitude of 9.5.
Next powerful rattled the US state of Alaska four years later with 9.1-magnitude.
Japan’s Tohoku was shaken in 2011 with a quake measuring 9 on the Richter scale.
The earthquakes that shook Turkey this week were high on the list.
A total of 6,444 buildings were destroyed in the Kahramanmaras-centered quakes that struck 10 provinces, affecting 13 million people.
Several countries in the region, including Syria and Lebanon, also felt the strong tremors in the space of less than 10 hours.
CURRENTPH NEWS SERVICE
