ERCIS Turkey (Reuters) – Turkey struggled to provide shelter yesterday to tens of thousands left homeless by an earthquake that killed nearly 500, and rescue teams began taking painful decisions to call off searches for those buried alive.
Three days after the 7.2 magnitude quake shook eastern Turkey, demolishing 3,000 buildings, rescue workers pulled out alive a 27-year-old woman and an 18-year-old student from collapsed buildings in Ercis, the town hit hardest.
At another crumpled building in the town, rescue workers who had worked non-stop for more than 48 hours switched off their generators and lights, convinced no one was left alive.
Seconds later, they received word that someone trapped below had made contact on a mobile phone.
“There are three people trapped under there. When we lifted a concrete slab, the phone must have been able to get reception,” said one rescue worker, as the lights were turned back on and his team returned to their job.
But hopes of finding more survivors were fading as time passed, and attention was shifting to the task of providing shelter to victims for the approaching winter.
The disaster is one more curse for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in the impoverished southeast, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.
