A mother and her six-year-old daugh­ter were rescued alive from a collapsed house in the Turk­ish town of Kahra­man­maraş during the night. The response teams from the German aid orga­ni­za­tion @fire and the British aid orga­ni­za­tion SARAID worked tire­lessly for almost 20 hours on the diffi­cult rescue.

After two people were already rescued by @fire’s search and rescue team early Wednes­day morn­ing, the mother and her child were located in the rubble of a collapsed build­ing around 05:00 am. There­upon a diffi­cult rescue mission started in a race against time. In sub-zero temper­a­tures, mother and child were in danger of freez­ing to death. 

For nearly 20 hours, disas­ter relief work­ers worked their way through the rubble. Using heavy equip­ment and manual labor, the task was to create a tunnel through the rubble in order to be able to rescue the mother and child. At 00:30 on Thurs­day night, the mother and her six-year-old daugh­ter were rescued alive from the rubble.

Rein­force­ments for the @fire team, which departed from Frank­furt Airport on Wednes­day evening, arrived at the airport in Adana during the night. The 20 addi­tional helpers are now making their way to Kahra­man­maraş with a rescue dog.

This means that a total of 40 volun­teers from the German aid organ­i­sa­tion @fire are now work­ing in the Turk­ish earth­quake zone with three rescue dogs. Numer­ous other helpers support the mission in logis­tics or in the home staff from Germany.

@fire - Inter­na­tionaler Katas­tro­phen­schutz Deutsch­land e. V. is a non-profit civil protec­tion orga­ni­za­tion that has been provid­ing rapid emer­gency aid world­wide follow­ing devas­tat­ing natural disas­ters since 2002. Respon­ders are specially trained in wild­land fire­fight­ing (WFF) and search and rescue of buried victims after earth­quakes (USAR). All of the more than 400 members are involved in national and inter­na­tional disas­ter relief on a volun­tary and unpaid basis. The civil protec­tion orga­ni­za­tion was clas­si­fied as the world’s first Light USAR Team by the United Nations Inter­na­tional Search and Rescue Advi­sory Group (INSARAG) in 2021 and oper­ates accord­ing to inter­na­tional stan­dards. Fund­ing for oper­a­tions, train­ing, and equip­ment is primar­ily donor-funded.

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We receive numer­ous requests for help. Unfor­tu­nately, we have no way of coor­di­nat­ing these. Please contact the local author­i­ties. Unfor­tu­nately, we also cannot accept offers of help - whether in the form of dona­tions in kind or manpower.

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Earthquake, Mission, USAR