As efforts continue in a race against time to pull more people out of the wreckage of two massive earthquakes that leveled 10 cities in southeastern Türkiye last Monday, survivors recall the deadly hour of the disaster and narrate how they managed to save themselves.
A family of four who was able to run out of their home before it collapsed lamented losing everything on that dark day in Hatay province.
“Everything came tumbling down,” Hasan Parlakgün, 50, the father of the family, told Anadolu Agency (AA).
“But the children are OK and we are grateful for our blessing. There is nothing that we can do," Parlakgün said. "Life goes on.”
Parlakgün and his wife Kevser have sent their children Yaşam and Uğur to the northwestern Zonguldak province in an effort to keep them safe and out of the way as they work to help with the search and rescue efforts, striving to recover their neighbors still trapped under the rubble.
“We will do everything we can to rebuild our life in Hatay,” Kevser Parlakgün said, noting they were happy to have “gotten away with their lives.”
“I feel so sorry for everyone here, especially for the young people. All their dreams for the future have crumbled. I don’t know if recovery in such a short period is possible. Everyone is standing straight for the children,” she said.
Another father became a hero, as well, when he dug his family of six out of the wreckage in the Adıyaman province using knowledge from his years of working in mines.
While a member of the Akbulut family remains in intensive care for treatment in the Şanlıurfa province, father Müslüm Akbulut related the story of how he was awoken by the tremors on Feb. 6, hours after coming home from a night shift, and how they were trapped in the disintegrating staircase opening while they were trying to escape.
When Akbulut tried to dislodge one of his sons from underneath debris, he felt a hole in the concrete. “After I freed my son’s leg, I called out and realized everyone was OK,” he recalled. Akbulut then took a piece of concrete, tried to enlarge the hole by digging at it, and managed to widen it enough for a person to pass through. He got all his children out of that hole.
“When I saw the light, hope swelled in me,” he said. “My experience from my time at mining construction sites helped us save ourselves.”
Around the same time in the Malatya province, the Kuşçu family avoided being crushed under the wreckage by mere seconds.
“Just as we took one step out the door, the building leaned sideways and collapsed into dust,” Gülseren Kuşçu said. “If we had stayed inside a bit longer, we all would have been killed.”
Gülseren, her husband Mehmet, their three children and their daughter-in-law are still trying to shake off the lingering effects of the disaster, even as they were safely transferred to a house in the Izmir province provided by the benevolent mukhtars of a Bornova neighborhood.
The night of the earthquake, Gülseren and her two daughters, aged 21 and 8, were alone in the house. “I thought ‘If we’re going to die, we should all die together.’ I grabbed them both and my sisters-in-law from the downstairs floor and hurled us all outside,” she explained.
The Kuşçu matriarch described the initial aftermath of the tremors as “apocalyptic.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. The Kuşçu family lost many of their relatives in the disaster. Now deprived of their homestead, the family is looking to build a new life in Izmir.
According to another victim, the earthquake “went on for 50 days” despite reports that it lasted 50 seconds.
Ferhat Güven, 54, recalled hearing a resounding thump when the tremors first hit Kahramanmaraş, the epicenter of the disaster. “Then it began to sound like pebbles and rocks were falling on sheet metal and the noise kept increasing. The power went out and I ran outside but it felt like it went on for 50 days. It kept going, it never stopped,” Güven said.
Meanwhile, 38-year-old Mahmut Hülagü said the moment of the earthquake was a “horrifying” one for him.
“It’s still imprinted on my mind and I won’t be able to forget it until I die,” he said.
When their home first began to jostle, Hülagü grabbed his children and took shelter next to a wall but his wife was still in the other room, screaming for help. “I could only focus on the children. I thought ‘This is where we die’ and began to pray. While the earthquake was still happening, I took the children outside with a burst of courage. It was freezing and really frosty. The building took a lot of damage but it didn’t go down. My wife too later made it out,” Hülagü said.
“Thankfully, we’re still alive but mentally, we’re in terrible shape,” he said.
Another victim of the earthquake said she owed her life to her intention to fast that Monday.
“I had woken up to have sahur to fast that day, so, I was in the kitchen when the tremors began. I got out alive because I hid under the kitchen table,” said 62-year-old Selva Ibrahimoğlu who was pulled out after three hours of being trapped under the rubble of her home in Hatay.
When the eight-story apartment building collapsed, the momentum drew Ibrahimoğlu and her daughter down into it, she recounted. “But there was a small space left that let air in and that’s where I breathed through,” she said.
She believes she would not have made it alive if she hadn’t been awake for sahur “because my bedroom is completely gone now.”
The death toll from the twin tremors has climbed incessantly over the past seven days and despite thousands of crews working around the clock to unearth more survivors across 10 cities, hopes are beginning to wane with each passing hour to reach the victims still trapped under the rubble in time.
