The combined death toll from last week’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria now tallied 41,000 people, even as rescue teams continued to search for any remaining survivors in the rubble.
Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Tuesday, February 14, to rebuild thousands of devastated homes, saying Turkey would eventually overcome the earthquake as it had other historic disasters.
“This disaster has been called the ‘disaster of the century.’ This is not a great exaggeration,” he said in Ankara, during a meeting of cabinet ministers held at the national emergency management agency.
“We will continue our fight together until the end,” Erdogan said.
Millions of children and adults who survived the quake need humanitarian aid, officials say, with many survivors left homeless in the middle of the freezing winter weather.
Although rescuers have raced against time to rescue residents through the rubble, cold weather and shortages of fuel and trucks complicated the efforts.
Millions of survivors are now staying at makeshift shelters, many in mosques and schools, where there are no toilets.
With much of Turkey and Syria’s infrastructure damaged or rendered inoperable by the earthquakes, health authorities are facing a daunting task in trying to ensure that survivors now remain disease-free.
The United Nations (UN) announced that a $397M humanitarian appeal would be allocated for Syria, and a similar appeal would be drawn up for Turkey in the coming days.
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