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Rescue teams pulled a 70-year-old man from a collapsed building in western Turkey, some 34 hours after a strong earthquake in the Aegean Sea struck Turkey and Greece, killing at least 51 and injuring more than 900. people.
Ahmet Citim was pulled from the rubble in Izmir shortly after midnight on Sunday and taken to hospital. Health Minister Fahrettin Koca tweeted that the man said: “I never lost hope.”
Search and rescue teams continued to work on nine buildings in Izmir at dawn on Sunday. AFAD said that more than 5,700 employees of state agencies, municipalities and non-governmental organizations had been activated for rescue work and hundreds more for food distribution, psychosocial help and damage control in buildings.
“If they are alive, we have a good chance of reaching them for 72 hours,” Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters. “God willing, it will be like this.”
Dogs, cats and rabbits were also rescued from the rubble.
Turkey’s emergency and disaster management service, or AFAD, raised the death toll in Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city, to 49 as rescuers pulled more bodies from collapsed buildings.
Two teenagers were also killed in Friday’s earthquake on the Greek island of Samos and at least 19 others were injured.
The quake, which according to the Istanbul-based Kandilli Institute had a magnitude of 6.9, was centered in the Aegean northeast of Samos. AFAD said it measured 6.6 and struck at a depth of about 16 km (10 miles).
A small tsunami struck in Izmir’s Seferihisar district, drowning an elderly woman. The tremors were felt in western Turkey, in Istanbul, as well as in the Greek capital, Athens. Hundreds of aftershocks followed.
AFAD said 896 people were injured in Turkey.
Turkey is riddled with faults and prone to earthquakes. In 1999, two powerful earthquakes killed about 18,000 people in northwestern Turkey. Earthquakes are also frequent in Greece.
In a show of solidarity rare in recent months of tense bilateral relations, Greek and Turkish government officials issued messages of mutual support over the past two days. Turkey, which suffered the most fatalities and damage, thanked other countries and international organizations for their statements of support.
The earthquake occurred when Turkey was already battling an economic recession and the coronavirus pandemic. So far, more than 10,000 people with the virus have died in Turkey.
