“You need at least machines to have a chance to design a plan in a place where there is a lot of room to move,” he said, referring to the lack of heavy machinery, such as bulldozers and bulldozers, needed to move large blocks of concrete.
The trapped ones could even survive for two weeks if they are given food and water while rescuers pull them out, he added.
The 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes, and the many aftershocks, struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6. Authorities have said this is the worst natural disaster to hit the region in a century.
Yahya Shikani, 29, wearing a black leather jacket and warming himself near a campfire, smoked chained cigarettes next to a pile of rubble in Antakya, where a Ukrainian rescue team was removing the bodies of his sister and two nieces.
Shikani, whose family had fled Syria to Turkey in 2015 after their home was bombed by Russian warplanes, said she had earlier called for help from rescue teams, including the police and the army, after seeing their bodies, but only the Ukrainians responded. .
“Really crazy fate,” he said. “I was sad that they died, but I was so happy that they were chosen because now we can mourn them.”
Among the rescuers was Yehor Tuprunov, who had come to Antakya from war-torn Ukraine.
“It is the same as in Ukraine because you have destroyed buildings, so many bodies. We felt this problem in Turkey, that’s why we came from Ukraine to this place, ”she said.
With hopes for more survivors fading with each passing hour, the focus turned to helping survivors, with tons of critical humanitarian aid and response teams pouring into Turkey.
The US Air Force has so far delivered more than 5,700 tons of rescue and disaster relief equipment, the US Agency for International Development said on Sunday.
But in sanctions-hit Syria, aid delivery has been hampered by a decade-long civil war and the availability of only one border crossing for United Nations aid delivery.
“So far we have failed the people in northwestern Syria. No wonder they feel abandoned,” the agency’s aid coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said Sunday in a cheep after his visit to the Turkish side of the crossing.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Sunday urged the Security Council to approve two additional crossings for the delivery of vital aid.
“People in the affected areas are counting on us. They are calling on our common humanity to help in their time of need,” he said in a statement. statement.
Speaking from the Syrian capital of Damascus, World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “The compounded crises of conflict, covid, cholera, economic decline and now the earthquake have taken an unbearable toll. “.
Kelly Cobiella reported from Antakya and Mithil Aggarwal from Hong Kong.
