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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