The Dutch search and rescue team USAR will again search for survivors of the earthquakes in Turkey on Saturday. But “the chance that we will find someone is extremely small,” says team member Jop Heinen on the sixth day since the earthquakes took place in Turkey and Syria.
On Friday, the team managed to pull an 8-year-old boy alive from under the rubble, 106 hours after the earthquakes. Heinen says that minutes later another rescue group had just found a deceased child. “That means that we are thrown back and forth in terms of feelings and experiences that we experience here as a team in providing aid to all those affected people.”
The rescue team is active in Hatay. In the night from Friday to Saturday it was cold there again with a temperature in the morning of below freezing, says Heinen. “We are going to try again. Soon two rescue groups will start working in the area,” he says. “We hope to be able to seize that minimal chance to meet someone and to mean something to the severely affected population.”
Rescue dogs
In recent days, the Dutch rescue team has rescued eleven people. USAR departed from Eindhoven airport for Turkey on Monday evening and set up base camp in the disaster area on Tuesday. The team consists of employees from the police, fire brigade, ambulance services and Defense who have been specially trained for this. There are also eight rescue dogs with them.
The number of deaths in Turkey and Syria after Monday’s strong earthquakes rose to more than 24,000 on Saturday.