Search for earthquake survivors enters final hours in Turkey

The desperate search for earthquake survivors in Turkiye and Syria entered its final hours Monday as rescuers using sniffer dogs and thermal cameras surveyed pulverised apartment blocks for any sign of life a week after the disaster.

Teams in southern Turkiye's Hatay province cheered and clapped when a 13-year-old boy identified only by his first name, Kaan, was pulled from the rubble. In Gaziantep province, rescue workers, including coal miners who secured tunnels with wooden supports, found a woman alive in the wreckage of a five-story building.

Stories of such rescues have flooded the airwaves in recent days. But tens of thousands of dead have been found during the same period, and experts say the window for rescues has nearly closed, given the length of time that has passed, the fact that temperatures have fallen to minus 6 degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) and the severity of the building collapses.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks struck southeastern Turkiye and northern Syria on February 6, reducing huge swaths of towns and cities to mountains of broken concrete and twisted metal. The death toll has surpassed 35,000.

Read | Nearly 26 mn people affected by Turkey-Syria quake: WHO

In some areas, searchers placed signs that read "ses yok," or "no sound," in front of buildings they had inspected for any sign that someone was alive inside, HaberTurk television reported.

Associated Press journalists in Adiyaman saw a sign painted on a concrete slab in front of wreckage indicating that an expert had inspected it. In Antakya, people left signs displaying their phone numbers and asking crews to contact them if they found any bodies in the rubble.

The quake's financial damage in Turkiye alone was estimated at $84.1 billion, according to the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation, a non-governmental business organisation. Calculated using a statistical comparison with a similarly devastating 1999 quake, the figure was considerably higher than any official estimates so far.

Elsewhere, Turkiye offered to open a second border crossing to assist the international aid effort to Syria, and the United Nations said "a lot of delicate discussions" were taking place to open more border-crossings from Turkiye to Syria.

Some 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the epicentre, almost no houses were left standing in the village of Polat, where residents salvaged refrigerators, washing machines and other goods from wrecked homes.

Not enough tents have arrived for the homeless, forcing families to share the tents that are available, survivor Zehra Kurukafa said.

"We sleep in the mud, all together with two, three, even four families," Kurukafa said.

Turkish authorities said Monday that more than 1,50,000 survivors have been moved to shelters outside the affected provinces. In the city of Adiyaman, Musa Bozkurt waited for a vehicle to bring him and others to western Turkiye.

"We're going away, but we have no idea what will happen when we get there," said the 25-year-old. "We have no goal. Even if there was (a plan), what good will it be after this hour? I no longer have my father or my uncle. What do I have left?"

Fuat Ekinci, a 55-year-old farmer, was reluctant to leave his home for western Turkiye, saying he did not have the means to live elsewhere and that his fields need to be tended.

"Those who have the means are leaving, but we're poor," he said. "The government says, go and live there a month or two. How do I leave my home? My fields are here, this is my home, how do I leave it behind?"

Volunteers from across Turkiye have mobilised to help millions of survivors, including a group of chefs and restaurant owners who served traditional food such as beans and rice and lentil soup to survivors who lined up in the streets of downtown Adiyaman.

The widespread damage included heritage sites in places such as Antakya, on the southern coast of Turkiye, an important ancient port and early centre of Christianity historically known as Antioch. Greek Orthodox churches in the region have started charity drives to assist the relief effort and raise funds to rebuild or repair churches.

In Syria, authorities said a newborn whose mother gave birth while trapped under the rubble of their home was doing well. The baby, Aya, was found hours after the quake, still connected by the umbilical cord to her mother, who was dead. She is being breastfed by the wife of the director of the hospital where she is being treated.

Such accounts have given many hope, but Eduardo Reinoso Angulo, a professor at the Institute of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the likelihood of finding people alive was "very, very small now."

David Alexander, a professor of emergency planning and management at University College London, agreed. He said the odds were not very good to begin with.

Many of the buildings were so poorly constructed that they collapsed into very small pieces, leaving very few spaces large enough for people to survive in, Alexander said.

"If a frame building of some kind goes over, generally speaking we do find open spaces in a heap of rubble where we can tunnel in," Alexander said. "Looking at some of these photographs from Turkiye and from Syria, there just aren't the spaces."

Winter conditions further reduced the window for survival. In the cold, the body shivers to keep warm, but that burns a lot of calories, meaning that people also deprived of food will die more quickly, said Dr Stephanie Lareau, a professor of emergency medicine at Virginia Tech in the US.