ERCIS, Turkey (Reuters) - A fiance's love saved 25-year-old teacher Gul Karacoban from being left to die under the rubble of a restaurant she was eating at when a deadly earthquake struck eastern Turkey.
Brought out alive on Monday along
with two colleagues, after 18 hours pinned under a mound of concrete and
masonry, she was stretchered into an ambulance while paramedics assured
her desperate fiance she would be alright.
"All I want is for her to live, I
don't care if she injured or not. It doesn't matter, I just want her
alive," air force Lieutenant Onur Eryasar told a Reuters photographer before climbing into the ambulance.
When the quake struck, Eryasar rushed from his base in Van to the town of Ercis
some 100 km (60 miles) away to find Karacoban, and by talking with her
friends and colleagues he learnt where she had gone to lunch.
Finding the restaurant in the dark, he shouted out her name. Hearing
the voices of other people trapped in the collapsed building he
persuaded one of the rescue teams to begin digging.
By late Monday morning his perseverance was rewarded as the young woman was carried out, alive and conscious.
At least 239 people died in Sunday's 7.2 magnitude earthquake that
struck the cities of Van and Ercis, but hundreds more were feared dead
and trapped beneath collapsed buildings.
Elsewhere in Ercis, a town of 100,000, a rescue worker stepped
carefully down the heap of dust and rubble that had once been an
internet cafe, cradling a tiny boy of maybe three years old.
His neck protected by a brace, the boy was crying as he was carried in his rescuer's arms to a waiting ambulance.
Another man emerged stunned, looking round in disbelief as he sat on
the debris that he'd been buried under overnight in the bitter cold.
Assisted down to the road, he stumbled away into the crowd.
A Reuters photographer saw a woman and her daughter being freed from
beneath a concrete slab in the wreckage of a building that had once been
six stories tall.
"I'm here, I'm here," the woman, named Fidan, called out in a hoarse
voice. Talking to her regularly while working for more than two hours to
find a way through, the rescuers cut through the slab, first sighting
the daughter's foot, before finally freeing them.
They were alive, but their bodies were badly swollen. Four dead bodies were pulled from the same building.
Distraught relatives continued their vigil in quake-stricken towns and villages.
"SHE WAS ALIVE... SHE'S WEARING RED PAJAMAS"
In Van, the provincial capital of 1 million people on the shores of Turkey's largest lake, fewer buildings collapsed.
But the quake destroyed a seven-story apartment block, home to around 40 families.
"Our grief is huge. My uncle's wife and her children are under the
rubble," said one woman watching heavy lifting machinery trying to
remove the slabs of fallen concrete.
"All our houses are damaged. We are staying in the youth sports center," she said, before breaking down in tears.
Another woman told Reuters her aunt and little cousin were buried
somewhere in a concertina of concrete slabs. At another site a mother
said her 24-year-old son, a veterinarian student, was also missing under
the rubble.
Emergency workers from half a dozen
rescue teams worked frantically to clear debris from a collapsed
four-storey building that had housed eight apartments, fearful rising
smoke meant there was a fire burning somewhere down below.
Nobody, either dead or alive, had
been brought out of the wrecked building so far, though one woman told a
rescue worker she had spoken to a friend, Hatice Hasimoglu, on her
mobile phone six hours after the quake and she was trapped inside.
The 24-year-old pre-school teacher had been living on the first floor of the building.
"She called me to say that she's
alive and she's stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building,"
said her friend, a fellow teacher. "She told me she was wearing red
pajamas," she said, standing with relatives begging the rescue workers
to hurry.
(Additional reporting by Omer
Berberoglu and Osman Orsal in ERCIS and Seda Sezer in VAN; Writing by
Simon Cameron-Moore; Edited by Richard Meares)
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