Five days after the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, which claimed more than 24,000 lives according to still provisional reports, relief operations are continuing. And sometimes lead to miracles.
A miracle in the middle of the freezing night of Kahramanmaras, one of the towns closest to the epicenter of the earthquake, where relief workers continue to be active, day and night. A seven-year-old boy, Zidvar, emerges from the rubble, alive. One of the rescue workers from Israel cannot believe it: “Five days! It’s been five days! It’s amazing to see that he is still aware that he is answering us, talking to us.”
“The translator asked him about him, his family and he says he is a fan of Messi.”
A rescuerat franceinfo
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Zidvar is carried to the ambulance on an orange stretcher. The police form a corridor to let him pass. The crowd gathers behind. We ask to be silent. Then the ambulance leaves, and the inhabitants applaud. Israeli and Turkish rescuers embrace.
A day following the voice of Zidvar
The rescue was difficult: they took a day to reach the boy, guided by his voice. “We had to dig tunnels to retrieve it about 25 meters through the rubble”, says Shena, another first aider. The boy is found in a state of advanced hypothermia in a cavity filled with dust. It took four hours to stabilize his condition.
The story is made all the more incredible by the fact that Shena and her fellow rescue workers pulled four people alive from the rubble the day before, including Zidvar’s father and sister. “At first we found this little girl and her father and on the way to the hospitalsays the rescuer. The father told us that there were people left in the building. There were voices, I heard them too. And there we found two other women aged 20 and 23.” They were neighbors of the family.
“The buildings fell on top of each other”
Hours before saving Zidvar, rescuers pulled a living man in his 50s out of the remains of a nearby building in the decimated area. The damage is colossal. “These buildings are part of a big neighborhood where there were mostly huge buildings of seven, eight or nine floors. And they fell on top of each other”described Sheenah.
A dozen diggers are still moving the debris over hundreds of meters, in the hope of finding other survivors. But most of the people rescued are already dead. The bodies are wrapped in blankets before being taken to a truck. Zidvar’s mother has still not been found.
Survivors five days after the earthquake in Turkey: report by Willy Moreau
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