Turkey: 70-year-old woman rescued alive after spending a week in rubble

Turkish emergency services managed to rescue a 70-year-old woman about a week after she was buried under the rubble of a destroyed building in the city of Gaziantep. All this after the earthquakes registered last week in the south of the country, near the border with Syria.

Fatma Gungor, 70, was found in the ruins of a seven-story building before she was taken to a hospital where she is being treated, Turkish state news agency Anatolia reported.

After the rescue relatives of Gangorwho were waiting around the remains, hugged and thanked the search and rescue teams for getting the woman out alive after the tragedy, who is grieving Turkey.

A week after the earthquakes, emergency services continue to search for living people to rescue, a task that is becoming more difficult by the hour, since the standard time for which a person can go without water or food in such natural disasters is 72 hours.

The earthquake has killed 35,500 people in Turkey and more than 3,700 people have been injured, compared to the figures provided by the health authorities of the government of Bashar al-Assad and those of the rebels in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo (northwest), according to various balance sheets released during the last hours .

exposed corruption

Emin Koramaz, president of the Union of Turkish Chambers of Architects and Engineers (TMMOB), denounced that during the 20 years in the government of the AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, eight major legalizations of the building “unsafe, rotten and illegal” were carried out and that they were built and inhabited without proper licenses.

“The city of Hatay, the entire province, has been damaged and must be completely rebuilt. The same applies to other cities in the 10 affected provinces. Now we remember how Erdogan campaigned in these provinces in 2018,” the president says to architects and engineers.

Turkey has building codes; However, according to critics of the Erdogan government, these rules are not respected and impunity is allowed for construction companies due to their ties to the government party.

“In 2018, almost two decades after the great earthquake of 1999, Turkey finally passed the long-awaited earthquake law. But these rules are more enforced by non-compliance than by compliance,” Asli Aydintasbas, a journalist born in Turkey and based in the United States, wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post.

(According to Europa Press)