A 3-year-old girl was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed eight-story building in Turkey on Tuesday — more than 90 hours after getting trapped by the area’s devastating earthquake.
Rescuers in Izmir found the youngster, identified by local officials as Ayda Gezgin, after hearing her cries for help four days after Friday’s 7.0-magnitude quake — and a day after another 3-year-old was rescued in the city.
Onlookers chanted “God is great!” and applauded as the youngster was wrapped in a thermal blanket and taken to an ambulance.
“We have witnessed a miracle in the 91st hour,” Izmir mayor Tunc Soyer tweeted, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“The miracle’s name is Ayda,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tweeted moments later, also sharing videos of the youngster waving from a hospital bed. “With your smiling eyes, you have inspired new hope for us. Thank God. Get well soon, my lovely little one,” the Turkish leader wrote.
Rescuer Nusret Aksoy said he was sifting through the rubble of the toppled eight-floor building when he heard a child’s scream and called for silence. He later located the girl in a tight space next to a dishwasher, which had shielded her from the carnage.
The girl waved at him, told him her name and said that she was okay, he said. “I got goosebumps and my colleague Ahmet cried,” he told HaberTurk television.
Ibrahim Topal, of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, said they barely believed it when they first heard her weak voice saying, “I’m here.”
“Then we shut everything down, the machines, and started listening again. And there really was a voice,” Topal said.
There was later tragedy, however, when the ongoing dig found the dead body of the girl’s mother, the Interior Ministry said later. Her brother and father were not inside the building at the time of the quake.
Ayda was the 107th person to have been pulled out of collapsed buildings alive following the quake — the same number listed as having been killed by Tuesday.
Officials said 144 quake survivors were still hospitalized, and three of them were in serious condition.
The U.S. Geological Survey registered the quake’s magnitude at 7.0, though other agencies recorded it as less severe.
The vast majority of the deaths and some 1,000 injuries occurred in Izmir. Two teenagers also died and 19 people were injured on the Greek island of Samos, near the quake’s epicenter in the Aegean Sea.
With Post Wires
