A 77-year-old woman was miraculously rescued from the rubbles of a collapsed building 9 days after the region’s deadliest earthquake in modern history.
Turkey’s state-run news agency Anadolu reported Wednesday, as another confused woman asked her rescuers: ‘What day is it?’ when pulled alive from the rubble of last week’s earthquake after 228 hours.
Turkey’s Ministry of National Defense released video Wednesday, February 15, showing workers carrying Fatma Gungor, 77, to safety in the city of Adiyaman on Tuesday, February 14.
‘I’m so excited, I don’t know what to say. We almost got to the point of giving up,’ one of the crew members who extricated Gungor from the debris told public broadcaster TRT Haber.
Gungor was loaded into a helicopter and flown to a hospital in the city of Mersin to be treated for injuries.
The other woman questioned ‘What day is it?’ after surviving under the rubble with her two children for 228 hours, according to Turkey‘s state-run news agency Anadolu.
Rescue personnel Mehmet Eryilmaz talked about the moment they found the mother and said, ‘The mother was happy to see us. I held her hand at first. We talked, chatted, and calmed her down, per CNN.
‘Eryilmaz also mentioned more of his dialogue with the mother and said she first asked for water, but he said they did not give anything without the intervention of the paramedics.
Eryilmaz told Anadolu that the first thing she asked was ‘What day is it?’.
She also told Eryilmaz that her name was Ela and she had two kids, a girl and a boy, who were pulled from the rubble with her.
Anadolu reported that she is a foreign national but did not mention what nationality.
Rescue crews miraculously continued pulling survivors from the rubble in Turkey and Syria more than nine days after.
