ANKARA, February 15. /TASS/. Turkish rescuers have rescued a 42-year-old Turkish woman named Melike Imamoglu, who had been trapped under the rubble of her house for 222 hours after the February 6 earthquake, Cumhuriyet newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The woman could not escape from her home in Kahramanmaras province’s Onikishubat district after the initial tremors erupted. For nine days, she was stuck under piles of concrete, trying to save her strength and wait for rescue workers. Specialists found her on the 10th day and were able to pull her out. The woman has now been taken to hospital in a satisfactory condition.
According to Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, relief efforts to remove debris at 215 sites in Kahramanmaras are continuing. The possibility that survivors are out there still exists.
News of miraculous rescues, as such cases are called in Turkey, are still trickling in, even though more than nine days have passed since the earthquake, with nighttime temperatures dropping below zero. On Monday and Tuesday, rescuers managed to pull several teenagers, an infant, children aged 4-7 and elderly people alive from under the debris of homes.
On February 6, 2023, 7.7 and 7.6-magnitude earthquakes struck Turkey’s Kahramanmaras province in the country’s southeast, nine hours apart. The tremors, followed by hundreds of aftershocks, were also felt in neighboring countries, of which Syria was most affected. In Turkey, more than 35,400 people were killed and more than 105,000 were injured.