Death toll tops 23,700 as Turkey, Syria rescue efforts continue

 

 
The confirmed death in Turkey and northwest Syria from the region’s deadliest earthquake in 20 years stands at more than 23,700, four days after it hit, according to officials.
Casualties from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which struck in the early hours on Monday, as well as several powerful aftershocks, have surpassed the more than 17,000 killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful earthquake hit northwest Turkey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged during a visit to Adiyaman province on Friday that the government’s response could have been better.

“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be,” he said.
Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said rescue teams had become “frantic” as hope for finding survivors dimmed with each passing hour.
Rescuers were “digging into the rubble and hoping to find some people dead or alive because now it has been more than 96 hours and the hopes here are fading”, he said, standing in front of a collapsed block of buildings in Kahramanmaras in southern Turkey, close to the epicentre of the first magnitude 7.8 earthquake.
“The families are here, waiting anxiously,” he added. “The scale of devastation is beyond imagination.”
Some time later, rescuers managed to dig out a man alive from under the rubble 110 hours since the earthquake struck, Serdar said.