Hopes for Earthquake Survivors in Turkey, Syria

The search-saving teams made recent efforts during Thursday night to find survivors under the ruins of collapsed buildings.

Images taken by fear of heights showed the devastation left behind, with entire neighborhoods flat.

The new figure, which will surely increase, includes over 17,600 people dead in Turkey and more than 3,300 in Syria now destroyed by civil war. And tens of thousands of people were injured.

While experts say that people can survive for a week or more, the chances of finding survivors in low temperatures are fading.

As emergency crews and relatives of panic dug through the rubble and occasionally found living people the focus began to shift to the decay of dangerous unstable structures.

Turkey's President Recep Tayp Erdogan called the “disaster of the century”.

In northwest Syria, overnight on Thursday 9, the first UN trucks arrived since the earthquake entered Turkey's rebel-controlled area, underlining the difficulty of helping people there.

The death toll from Monday's 7.8-magnitude earthquake exceeded the death toll of more than 18,400 by the 2011 earthquake that caused a tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, and the 1999 earthquake near the Turkish capital, Istanbul, that killed about 18,000 people. /Rel