The earthquake affected an area that is home to 13.5 million people in Turkey and an unknown number in Syria and stretches farther than the distance from London to Paris or Boston to Philadelphia.
Even with an army of people taking part in the rescue effort, crews had to pick and choose where to help.
The death toll from Monday’s 7.8 magnitude catastrophe rose 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. In Nurdagi, a city of around 40,000 nestled between snowy mountains some 35 miles from the quake’s epicenter, vast swaths of the city were leveled, with scarcely a building unaffected. Even those that did not collapse were heavily damaged, making them unsafe.
“There’s no hope. We can’t give up our hope in God, but they entered the building with listening devices and dogs, and there was nothing,” Yilmaz said. At the entrance, a man wept over a black body bag that lay next to another in the bed of a small truck. “I’m 70 years old. God should have taken me, not my son,” he cried.
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