Experts say that, given the freezing temperatures – and the total collapse of many buildings – the window for finding survivors is now almost closed.
Thousands of people left homeless by a massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria a week ago packed into crowded tents or lined up in the streets for hot meals on Monday, while the desperate search for anyone still alive entered what were likely to be its last hours.
A crew pulled a four-year-old girl from rubble in hard-hit Adiyaman, 177 hours after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck.
The rescuers were among thousands of local and overseas teams, including Turkish coal miners and experts aided by sniffer dogs and thermal cameras, who scoured flattened apartment blocks for signs of life.
As well as stories of near-miraculous rescues in recent days – many broadcast live on Turkish television and beamed around the world – tens of thousands of bodies have been found during the same period.
Experts say that, given the freezing temperatures – and the total collapse of so many buildings – the window for such rescues is now almost closed.
The quake and hundreds of aftershocks, some nearly as powerful as the first, struck south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6, killing more than 35,000 people and reducing whole swathes of towns and cities inhabited by millions to fragments of concrete and twisted metal.
Some 62 miles (100km) 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, said survivor Zehra Kurukafa, forcing families to share the tents that are available.
“We sleep in the mud, all together with two, three, even four families,” she said.
In the city of Adiyaman, 25-year-old Musa Bozkurt waited for a vehicle to take him and others to the city of Afyon, in western Turkey.
“We’re going away, but we have no idea what will happen when we get there,” he said.
“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-farmer, was reluctant to leave his home for Afyon despite the destruction, saying he didn’t have the means to live elsewhere and had fields that 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 Turkey have mobilized to help millions of survivors, including a group of volunteer chefs and restaurant owners who served traditional food such as beans and rice and lentil soup for survivors who lined up in the streets of downtown Adiyaman.
Other volunteers continued with the rescue efforts.
After rescuers pulled out the four-year-old girl, a relative told HaberTurk television that more loved ones were inside the building.
As the scale of the disaster grows, sorrow and disbelief have turned to rage over the sense that there has been an ineffective response to the disaster.
That anger could be a political problem for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who faces a tough re-election battle in May.
Meanwhile, on Monday, rescue workers, including coal miners, found a woman alive in the wreckage of a five-storey building in Gaziantep province.
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 is “very, very small now”.
David Alexander, a professor of emergency planning and management at University College London, agreed. But he added that 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, he 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,” Prof Alexander said. “Looking at some of these photographs from Turkey and from Syria, there just aren’t the spaces.”
Turkey’s death toll from the quake has passed 31,000. Deaths in Syria, split between rebel-held areas and government-held areas, have risen beyond 3,500, although those reported by the government have not been updated for days.
Visiting the Turkish-Syrian border on Sunday, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths said the international community has failed to provide aid.
Syrians “rightly feel abandoned”, he said, adding: “My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can.”
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Monday, the UN special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, told reporters that the “troubles” regarding the flow of aid to Syria’s rebel-held northwest are “now being corrected”.
The Kurdish-led administration in north-east Syria, meanwhile, said that 53 trucks carrying aid have crossed from Kurdish territory into earthquake-damaged areas controlled by rival Turkish-backed rebels in north-west Syria who had previously prevented convoys from crossing.
Turkish authorities consider the Syrian Democratic Forces to be a terrorist group, along with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Turkey-based Kurdish separatist group.
