Death toll rises, rescues dwindle in earthquake aftermath

A teenager was pulled largely unscathed from beneath the rubble of a collapsed building in the Turkey city of Gaziantep early Friday, in a dramatic rescue that belied the reality that the chances of finding many more survivors four days after a catastrophic earthquake killed tens of thousands are shrinking fast. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the border region between Turkey and Syria, an area home to more than 13.5 million people, killing more than 20,000 people. Bodies lay wrapped in blankets, rugs and tarps in the streets of some cities, with morgues and cemeteries overwhelmed. Before dawn in Gaziantep, near the epicenter of the quake, rescuers pulled Adnan Muhammed Korkut from the basement where had been trapped since the temblor struck Monday. The 17-year-old beamed a smile at the crowd of friends and relatives who chanted “Adnan,” “Adnan,” clapping and crying tears of joy as he was carried out and put onto a stretcher. “Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance. “Thank you everyone.” Trapped for 94 hours, but not crushed, the teenager said he had been forced to drink his own urine to slake his thirst. “I was able to survive that way,” he said. “I have a son just like you,” a rescue worker, identified only as Yasemin, told him after giving him a warm hug. “I swear to you, I have not slept for four days. I swear I did not sleep; I was trying to get you out.” The death toll from the earthquake, which Turkish Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called “the disaster of the century,” has risen to nearly 21,000, eclipsing the more than 18,400 who died in the 2011 earthquake off Fukushima, Japan, that triggered a tsunami and the estimated 18,000 people who died in a temblor near the Turkish capital, Istanbul, in 1999. The new figure, which is certain to rise, included over 17,600 people in Turkey and more than 3,300 in civil war-torn Syria. T