Turkey gives up hope of finding survivors of devastating earhquake

TURKISH rescuers yesterday gave up searching for survivors of a devastating quake, saying only steel bunk beds had saved some boys' lives in a collapsed school dormitory that experts branded a flimsy death-trap.

The earthquake struck the eastern province of Bingol early on Thursday, killing at least 167 across the mountainous region, including 84 boys and one teacher at the state-run school.

Rescuers at the scene said the metal bunk beds in which the dormitory students slept had proved stronger than the walls of the four-storey building, completed in the late 1990s. “Without steel bunk beds and lockers we would not have been able to pull a single living person out of this rubble,” said Ufuk Solmaz, chief of a civil defence rescue team from nearby Diyarbakir.

Around 115 boys were extracted alive from air-filled spaces in the rubble or escaped the building as it collapsed.

The last survivor was pulled out early on Friday.

“Rescue operations on the wreckage have come to an end,” provincial governor Huseyin Cos said at the site.

Cos was the focus of riots on Friday by locals complaining of slow food and tent distribution. While search and rescue teams, experienced from regular quakes that hit Turkey, responded quickly, local authorities were slow to hand out tents and set up mobile kitchens.

But by yesterday, most families had obtained a tent and had pitched it close to their homes, many of them damaged by the quake and too dangerous to visit. They rose early to get bread from Red Crescent aid points. Funerals were held across the towns and villages of the mainly Kurdish province, hit by another major quake in 1991 and at the heart of nearly two decades of conflict with Kurdish rebels. The quake measured 6.4 on the Richter scale.