Hopes fading for trapped quake children

Rescue equipment fell silent as searchers listened today for any sign of life under a flattened school dormitory where about 70 children remained trapped since a strong earthquake rocked eastern Turkey.

Working against time, the rescuers prayed they would reach them alive, but hopes were fading after the bodies of 39 children were found.

“I have been sitting here since yesterday morning,” said Gazal Gunalan, whose 15-year-old son Mehmet was buried under the rubble.

“At the beginning I was expecting him to come out alive ... now I’m waiting for his body.”

Overnight, rescuers found five children alive and 12 dead, officials said adding that more dead children were inside.

“I saw an entire dormitory ward squashed under the ceiling with at least eight children crushed to death inside,” said rescue worker Semsettin Sayan.

Major Oguz Tozak in charge of a rescue team of at the school in Celtiksuyu said he feared up to two-thirds of the students still trapped may be dead.

“The debris is a difficult one but we have not lost hope,” Tozak said.

Intermittently, rescuers turned off generators and lights to scan the rubble with sensitive microphones to detect any sounds.

Sniffer dogs climbed on the debris hunting for survivors.

Rescuers built a tunnel from the basement of the building up to the flattened third floor where two children were believed to be alive. No one was found there.

The 198 students in the dorm, aged seven to 16, were asleep when the magnitude 6.4 quake struck early yesterday and collapsed the Celtiksuyu boarding school.

By dawn today, 90 children had been rescued alive from the rubble, leaving about 70 still unaccounted for.

Hundreds of people, most of them relatives of the missing students, kept vigil near the rubble, wailing and praying under the floodlights used to keep up the search through the night.

The quake’s epicentre was just outside the nearby city of Bingol, 430 miles east of Ankara.

Bingol is a rural, poor area in the predominantly Kurdish south-east that suffered years of fierce fighting between the Turkish army and Kurdish autonomy-seeking rebels.

Bingol’s governor Huseyin Avni Cos said the official death toll today stood at 105. About 1,000 people were injured in the quake.

The primary and middle boarding school was built in 1999 mainly for the children of poor farmers from surrounding villages that have no schools and poor transportation services.

It also represented the hope for a better future for the children of poor Kurds, who are often illiterate.

“My son always said ’I don’t want to stay uneducated like you Dad. I want a different life,”’ said Nihat Bezekci, whose 11-year-old son Ahmet was still trapped in the building.

“If I had been able, I wish I had sent him to a better school, not here.”

Bezekci said he tried to keep his hopes up all night.

“But now my hopes have totally collapsed. I suppose God had written his destiny,” said the Kurdish farmer.

Rescued children were treated for their injuries on mattresses laid out at the site.

Recep Gungor said he woke up with his bunk bed shaking and fell off.

“Then the bed fell on me. I said ’it is an earthquake,’ but I don’t remember how I was rescued,” he said.

Again the country focused on the issue of poor construction – the cause for heavy death tolls in previous quakes.

Much of the country sits atop the active North Anatolian fault and tremors are frequent. A 1971 quake in Bingol killed 900 people.