As they lift slabs of cement with cranes and smash the rubble with jackhammers, search and rescue teams are a noisy bunch. But then, come moments of absolute silence.
Silence is key to detecting the faintest noise, which could be the sign of a survivor buried beneath the rubble from Monday's earthquake in Türkiye.
Among the wreckage of a collapsed 14-story building in the Turkish city of Adana, the shriek of a whistle pierced the noise every few minutes on Wednesday. Rescue workers hollered for quiet, and listened for any hint of voices from the debris. Hundreds of people watching hushed.
During one particular moment of digging, volunteer Bekir Biçer uncovered a crushed birdcage. Inside was a blue-and-yellow bird, alive after nearly 60 hours. "I was very happy. I nearly cried. The cage was broken, but the bird was still inside," Biçer said. Friends and family of those assumed trapped sat beside fires, waiting for a miracle even as the survival window for those trapped under the rubble was closing.
Suat Yarkan, 50, said his aunt and her two daughters lived in an apartment on the building’s fourth floor. They would have been home asleep when the quake struck. He was desperate for hope that they could be rescued alive. "Look at the bird. 60 hours. It makes me feel like maybe God is helping us ... I have to believe that they will recover everyone," he said. Regular moments of silence are essential to such operations, said David Alexander, professor of emergency planning and management at University College London. "We often find helicopters hovering overhead, making a huge noise and sometimes also blowing up dust whilst teams are desperately trying to listen in to noises that might indicate someone alive and moving under the rubble," he said. Sophisticated rescue teams will use microphones to pick up faint noises, while specially trained dogs and fiber-optic cameras pick up heat inside mounds of debris. But given the need to move quickly, and the limited number of rescue teams deployed across a huge area, cries for help are key. "If a person can attract attention under the rubble, their chances of being saved is about three times higher than it would be if they’re in a coma, statistically speaking," Alexander noted.
As the sun set on Wednesday for the third time on devastated cities and towns, the push to recover survivors became more urgent as the lack of food and water, bitterly cold weather and potential injuries grew even more acute.
In Adana on Wednesday, rescue workers at another collapsed building draped a white sheet across a recess in the mound of debris, obscuring the view of what they had discovered there.
The digging machines came to a halt, and a stretcher was pulled behind the sheet as workers looked on in silence. An ancient city of more than 2 million inhabitants just 32 kilometers (20 miles) from the Mediterranean Sea, Adana has experienced earthquakes before. A 6.3 magnitude tremor in 1998 killed nearly 150 people in the city and its surroundings, and left thousands homeless. This week's stronger quake left a large number of Adana’s buildings, many of them modern, seemingly untouched. Many high-rise apartment buildings appeared entirely undamaged. On the city’s northern fringe, however, several 14-storeyed buildings collapsed.