A 24-year-old woman buried alive for nearly a week was pulled from the rubble of a collapsed Turkish housing block on Monday, the second ”miracle survivor” from a tragedy in which at least 87 died.
Yasemin Yaprakci was exhausted but conscious when rescued after 157 hours without food and water, trapped under rubble, alongside the bodies of relatives killed when building collapsed last Monday in the central Turkish city of Konya.
The woman was calm and controlled during the three hours of work needed to pry her out from under heavy slabs of concrete and dead bodies, rescuers said.
”I told her not to worry and that we would save her in no time at all,” Niyazi Ozbek from the Ankara civil defence team told Anatolia news agency.
”She said ‘get me out and I will have you over for tea’,” he said, adding that he was unable to hold back his tears.
The real boost came when Yaprakci was told her one-and-half-year-old daughter, Bahar, was still alive and she was able to speak to her husband over a walkie-talkie, rescuers said.
”Once they spoke on the walkie-talkie, her spirits improved,” Fatih Carmikci, one of her rescuers said.
The first thing Yaprakci asked for was water, but rescuers only wetted her lips, Ozbek said.
Initial reports suggested her condition was life-threatening.
But a doctor at the Gulhane military hospital in the capital Ankara, where she taken by helicopter for emergency treatment, said the young mother was doing fine.
”She is not in a critical condition … She has no fractures. She has some air accumulated under the tissue over her lungs,” the doctor said.
Rescue teams dug the woman out from the basement of the 11-storey building early on Monday after probing the rubble with listening devices and sniffer dogs overnight.
Yaprakci herself helped rescuers by scratching the walls with her nails, rescuers said.
She was the second miracle survivor to be pulled from the wreckage of the building that collapsed last Monday evening, as many residents would have been celebrating a Muslim festival.
A 16-year-old boy was pulled from the debris on Sunday morning after surviving in an air pocket in the basement. Officials said he was in good health.
Yaprakci was at home with her husband and daughter receiving relatives in their first-floor flat when the building started to crumble, according to newspaper reports.
Her husband grabbed their daughter and ran downstairs. He threw the baby girl into the garden and jumped out just as the apartment block collapsed, trapping Yasemin and seven other relatives, the reports said.
The husband was himself injured by rubble that fell on his legs.
At least two of their relatives were among the dead.
The death toll from the tragedy rose to 87 on Monday after rescuers pulled out more bodies from the wreckage. A total of 33 people were rescued from the rubble, most of them immediately after the building collapsed.
Authorities believe about 15 people are still buried under the mass of concrete and twisted metal.
The collapse has been largely blamed on shoddy construction, and the buildings’s architect and one if his associates were charged last week with ”causing death through negligence”.
Experts investigating the incident said last week they had found a number of faults in the building, including the use of low-quality cement and the improper use of building materials. — Sapa-AFP