A teenage girl has been pulled alive from the rubble after being trapped for more than 80 hours following the massive earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria.
Sixteen-year-old Melda Adtas was the subject of a dramatic rescue operation on Thursday, leaving her father overjoyed and brimming with tears, safe in the knowledge that his daughter was still alive.
Melda was found cold, bruised and pale, her face covered in dust from mounds of rubble in the city of Antakya, that falls under Hatay, one of Turkey’s worst hit provinces.
“My dear, my dear!” her father cried out as soon as he got a first glimpse of his daughter, while crowds witnessing the extraordinary moment swiftly broke into applause.
Efforts to save the girl took place over five hours after neighbours alerted rescue workers to sounds coming from the walls. Three more people were found alive in the same building, fuelling Melda’s father’s optimism that he would find his missing daughter.
Relief workers attempted to maintain contact with Melda, who was found stuck under a collapsed wall. They finally came through to her after removing piles of debris.
Melda was wrapped in a blanket and taken to an ambulance for emergency care.
Stories of dramatic rescues are still emerging more than four days, or over 100 hours, since the disaster struck, boosting morale for rescue workers racing against time to find others like Melda.
In the Turkish city of Gaziantep, another teenager, Adnan Muhammed Korkut, was rescued from the basement of a building after being trapped there for more than 94 hours.
The teenager beamed when he saw open skies for the first time in days and recounted his ordeal, claiming he drank his own urine to quench his thirst.
“I was able to survive that way,” he said.
The quakes that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday have left more than 21,000 dead.
Hopes of finding more survivors are dimming, with the significant obstacle of winter, with its freezing temperatures, complicating chances of survival.
One of the catastrophic earthquakes, of 7.8 magnitude, had struck the border region between Turkey and Syria.
Hundreds of dead bodies wrapped in blankets and tarps were seen lined up on the streets of some cities as morgues and cemeteries remain overwhelmed.
Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called the quakes “the disaster of the century”. Death tallies from this week’s quakes have eclipsed the grim count of 18,400 deaths from the 2011 earthquake in Fukushima, Japan.
More than 18,300 fatalities have been confirmed in Turkey, while more than 3,300 have been declared dead so far in civil war-torn Syria.
Tens of thousands have been injured as well and as many people are now homeless.
The toll is expected to rise further.
