Monday marks exactly one week after devastating earthquakes left more than 33,000 dead in Türkiye and Syria. Yet, miraculously, rescuers pulled more survivors from the rubble over the weekend and early Monday.
A young boy and a 62-year-old woman were the latest miraculous rescues after nearly seven days trapped under the wreckage of collapsed buildings since the earthquake.
Seven-year-old Mustafa was rescued in southern Türkiye's Hatay province, while Nafize Yilmaz was pulled free in Nurdağı, in Gaziantep. Both had been trapped for 163 hours before their rescue late Sunday. More than 32,000 people from around Türkiye work on search and rescue efforts, along with more than 8,000 international rescuers. A member of a British search team posted a great video on Twitter on Sunday showing a rescuer crawling down a tunnel created through the rubble to find a Turkish man who had been trapped for five days in Hatay.
Search teams are facing a race against the clock as experts caution that hopes of finding people alive in the debris dim with each passing day.
In the devastated Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş, near the quake's epicenter, excavators dug through mountains of twisted rubble as a rescue team recovered a body from the wreckage.
Sibel Kaya was rescued from the rubble of a five-story building in the Islahiye district of Gaziantep province. The 40-year-old woman was saved 170 hours after the quake. Another miracle rescue came when teams pulled Erengül Önder, 60, from the rubble after 166 hours in the Besni district of Adıyaman province. Cengiz Polat, a 45-year-old father of three, was pulled from the debris in Kahramanmaraş province thanks to rescue teams’ efforts to save him after he was trapped for 162 hours. During the rescue efforts, Polat told the rescuers that he hit the stove next to him to make a sound. A rescue team from the Gölcük Shipyard Command in northwestern Kocaeli, which itself suffered from one of the worst earthquakes to strike Türkiye in 1999, pulled 10-year-old Asima Baltacı alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in Adıyaman. Asima was trapped for 158 hours. Her first wish, to eat fruit gummies, touched the rescuers’ hearts.
Serap Dönmez was found alive by crews checking an apartment building in Antakya, Hatay, and was pulled to safety 176 hours after the earthquake. Three hours earlier, 53-year-old Nahide Umam was found alive in another apartment building in the same district. Bünyamin Idacı, 35, was pulled to safety 177 hours after the earthquake from his home in an eight-story apartment building in Adıyaman.
Digging through the rubble of an eight-story building, crews reached a woman, assuring her that other family members were rescued earlier. Some 178 hours after the earthquake, 70-year-old Nuray Gürbüz was rescued alive also in Antakya. Around the same time in Adıyaman, 6-year-old Miray was rescued from an apartment building. Media outlets reported that rescue crews were also closing in on the spot her older sister was trapped.
Factors vary, but experts say people trapped in the rubble of an earthquake can survive for up to a week or more. They emphasize that it depends on their injuries, how they are trapped, and the weather conditions. Most rescues occur in the first 24 hours after a disaster. After that, survival chances drop as each day passes, experts said. Many victims are badly injured or buried by falling stones or other debris. Access to water and air to breathe are crucial factors, along with weather conditions.
Chilly and winter conditions in Syria and Türkiye have hampered rescue efforts, and temperatures have dipped below freezing. "Typically, it is rare to find survivors after the fifth to seventh days, and most search and rescue teams will consider stopping by then,'' Dr. Jarone Lee, an emergency and disaster medicine expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Associated Press (AP). "But, there are many stories of people surviving well past the seven-day mark. Unfortunately, these are usually rare and extraordinary cases.''
People with trauma injuries, including crush injuries and limb amputations, face the most critical survival window, said Dr. George Chiampas, an emergency medicine specialist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg medical school. "If you don’t pull them out in one hour, in that golden hour, there’s a meager chance of survival," he said. Those with other illnesses, whose health depends on medications, also face grim chances, Chiampas said. Age, physical and mental condition are all critical. "You see a lot of different scenarios where we’ve had some miraculous saves and people have survived under horrible conditions," said Dr. Christopher Colwell, an emergency medicine specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. "They tend to be younger people and have been fortunate enough to find either a pocket in the rubble or some way to access needed elements like air and water.''
After the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, a teenager and his 80-year-old grandmother were found alive after nine days trapped in their flattened home. The year before, a 16-year-old Haitian girl was rescued from earthquake rubble in Port-Au-Prince after 15 days. Mental state can also affect survival. People trapped next to bodies, who have no contact with other survivors or rescuers, may give up hope, Chiampas noted. "If you have someone alive, you’re leaning on each other to keep fighting," he said.
More than 90% of earthquake survivors are rescued within the first three days, Ilan Kelman, a professor of disasters and health at University College London, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). With the 72-hour window closing early on Thursday morning, Kelman told AFP why this timeframe is so important. "Generally, earthquakes do not kill people; collapsing infrastructure kills people," said Kelman, who has published research on quake rescue responses. He said that the most critical factor is getting medical attention to people crushed under collapsed buildings before "their bodies fail" or they bleed out. Kelman said that "the vast majority of survivors are brought out within 24 hours by local teams, often using no more than bare hands or shovels."
