Under the Turkey quake rubble: Gasps of air, protein powder and miraculous rescues

ISTANBUL - For about 200 hours, two Turkish brothers entombed under the rubble of a collapsed building in the earthquake-devastated city of Kahramanmaras held on, rationing bodybuilding supplements, drinking their own urine, swallowing gulps of air.

“Breathing was easy,” one brother, 21-year-old Abdulbaki Yeninar, told the local Ihlas news agency. “We took protein powder.”

On Tuesday, rescue workers pried Mr Yeninar and his brother, Muhammed Enes Yeninar, 17, from the cement and twisted metal, one of at least nine such improbable rescues over a week after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake levelled towns, killed tens of thousands of people and displaced many more in Turkey and Syria.

In the same city, teams dug a tunnel about 5m long through tonnes of fallen walls, floors and piping to reach a woman, in a rescue that was broadcast on live TV.

And to the south, a volunteer mining crew joined the efforts to save another, earning tribute from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said they “will never fade away from our memories”.

The miraculous rescues served as rare bright spots in one of the bleakest periods in memory for Turkey, what Mr Erdogan said on Tuesday could reasonably be called the “disaster of the century”.

He reported a new death toll for his country, 35,418, and the United Nations said that more than 5,500 Syrians had died.

Millions more people in both countries have been displaced since the quake devastated the region last week.

Many are afraid to return to damaged buildings and are struggling to survive in makeshift shelters and extreme cold.

Relief organisations typically scramble to find survivors in the first 72 hours after a natural disaster, as the passing of time exponentially diminishes hope for finding signs of life.

In the past week, more than 35,000 Turkish search and rescue teams joined thousands of international workers to dig through the rubble, according to Afad, Turkey’s emergency management agency.

In recent days, desperation has increasingly set in as the rescue missions have turned to recovery, a humanitarian crisis has taken shape, and hard-hit and hard-to-reach Syrian towns have lamented that they have been forgotten.

On Tuesday, as the total death toll in both Syria and Turkey surpassed 40,000, the Turkish authorities arrested more contractors suspected of shoddy construction that violated building codes.

Critics of Mr Erdogan, who is seeking to defend his response to the disaster, drew attention to videos that showed him previously hailing some of the housing projects that crumbled and buried people.

And Turkish police detained scores of social media users on accusations of spreading panic-inducing posts.

But as Turkey’s National Defence Department and national broadcasters shared footage of the rescues, the rare glimmers of good news were celebrated.

In the city of Adiyaman, in south-eastern Turkey, rescue workers in bright red and yellow hard hats and vests contrasted sharply with the dust-caked skin and hair of a young man they sought to free from the rubble.

After digging out the man, identified by state news agencies as Muhammed Cafer Cetin, 18, they hooked him up to an IV, fitted him with an oxygen mask and wrapped him in a shimmering survival blanket.

They then delicately carried him in a stretcher over the debris, under which he had been buried, to an ambulance waiting to take him to the hospital. His condition was not immediately clear. Another man, 45-year-old Ramazan Yucel, was also rescued in the province, according to state news agency Anadolu.

Finally free, the exhausted Yeninar brothers emerged from the rubble, their eyes shut and their arms bound in stretchers as rescuers in fatigues and bright vests carried them away in Kahramanmaras, near the epicentre of the quake.

Desperate for good news, the workers embraced one another and cheered as the brothers left for the hospital, where they explained how they had survived to the news media.

Rescuers had pulled their mother, also alive, out of the rubble two days earlier, and she was being treated in a hospital in the city of Kayseri for leg injuries, they said.

In the same city, the state news service Anadolu Agency broadcast the rescue of Ms Aysegul Bayir, 35, live to a rapt Turkish audience. Viewers watched as rescue teams dug a 5m tunnel through the ruins to reach her.

In the same levelled town, Mr Muharrem Polat, 32, and his wife Hadiyet Polat emerged from the rubble after 203 hours.

In Antakya, a volunteer mining crew from the northern province of Zonguldak found Ms Emine Akgul, 26, and pulled her to safety, according to state broadcaster, TRT.

Another woman was rescued in Antakya City in Hatay province, 204 hours after the quake struck.

Mr Erdogan hailed the miners, saying: “The tunnels they dug, bringing out our citizens, are truly extraordinary deeds.”

While the footage of the survivors, lifted out of the ruins to applause, heartened rescue workers who had been clawing through the frigid cement for days and encouraged a grieving population, the rescues were most likely a fleeting, and perhaps final, dose of such news.

The chances of finding more survivors will only dim as the hours and days grow, experts say.

And, facing the challenges posed by millions of homeless and displaced citizens, many of them hungry, Turkey and Syria grappled with the scope of the relief effort and the search for accountability. NYTIMES