A teenager trapped following the devastating earthquakes in Turkey says he was forced to drink his own urine during the 94 hours he spent under the rubble.
“I was able to survive that way,” Adnan Muhammed Korkut explained, after being pulled from the basement where had been trapped since two major earthquakes and more than 100 aftershocks struck on Monday.
Before dawn in Gaziantep, near the epicentre of the quake, rescuers pulled Adnan from the remains of his home – a crush of twisted metal, buckled walls, smashed tiles, and mangled beams.
The 17-year-old beamed a smile, warped by panic and relief, at the crowd of friends and relatives who cried tears of joy as he was carried out and put onto a stretcher.
“Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance. “Thank you everyone.”
A rescue worker, identified only as Yasemin, told him: “I have a son just like you.
“I swear to you, I have not slept for four days. I swear I did not sleep; I was trying to get you out.”
Ankara‘s disaster management agency said 18,342 people had been confirmed killed in the disaster so far in Turkey, with nearly 75,000 injured.
No figures have been released on how many have been left homeless, but the agency said more than 75,000 survivors have been evacuated to other provinces.
More than 3,300 have been confirmed killed on the other side of the border in war-torn Syria, bringing the total number of dead to more than 21,600.
Engineers suggested that the scale of the devastation is partly explained by lax enforcement of building codes, which some have warned for years would make them vulnerable to earthquakes.
The problem has been largely ignored, experts said, because addressing it would be expensive, unpopular and restrain a key engine of the country’s economic growth.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called the quake “the disaster of the century”.
The death toll eclipses the more than 18,400 who died in the 2011 earthquake off Fukushima, Japan, that triggered a tsunami and the estimated 18,000 people who died in a tremor near Istanbul in 1999.
The new figure, which is certain to rise, included more than 17,600 people in Turkey and more than 3,300 in civil war-torn Syria.
Tens of thousands were also injured and many tens of thousands have been left homeless.
