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From our special correspondents in Kahramanmaras – In the quake-stricken Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, locals and rescue workers are digging through the rubble, some with their bare hands, clinging to hopes of a miracle as they hunt for survivors of Monday’s devastating earthquakes in a frantic race against the clock – and the bitter cold.
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….
Source : france24
