More than 12,000 confirmed fatalities in world’s deadliest earthquake in over a decade

They lifted slabs of cement with enormous cranes and smashed rubble with jackhammers. Then, they stopped. Silence.

Among the wreckage of a collapsed 14-storey building in the Turkish city of Adana, the shriek of a whistle pierced the noise every few minutes on Wednesday. Rescue workers hollered for quiet, and listened for any hint of voices from the debris. Hundreds of people watching hushed.

During one moment of digging, volunteer Bekir Bicer uncovered a crushed birdcage, he said. Inside was a blue and yellow bird, alive after nearly 60 hours.

“I was very happy. I nearly cried,” Bicer said. “The cage was broken, but the bird was still inside.”

Friends and family of those who remained trapped under the rubble sat beside fires, waiting for a miracle even as the survival window was closing.

Suat Yarkan, 50, said his aunt and her two daughters lived in an apartment on the building’s fourth floor. They would have been home asleep when the quake struck. He was desperate for hope that they could be rescued alive

Look at the bird. Sixty hours,” he said. “It makes me feel like maybe God is helping us … I have to believe that they will recover everyone.”

As the sun set Wednesday for the third time on devastated cities and towns in Turkey and Syria, the push to recover survivors became more urgent as the lack of food and water, bitterly cold weather and potential injuries grew even more acute.

Prospects for finding survivors almost three days after the quake are narrow, experts say.

“The first 72 hours are considered to be critical as the condition of people trapped and injured can deteriorate quickly and become fatal if they are not rescued and given medical attention in time,” said Steven Godby, an expert in natural hazards at Nottingham Trent University in England.

In Adana on Wednesday, rescue workers at another collapsed building draped a white sheet across a recess in the mound of debris, obscuring the view of what they’d discovered there.

The region sits on top of major fault lines and is frequently shaken by earthquakes. Some 18,000 were killed in similarly powerful earthquakes that hit northwest Turkey in 1999.

The toll in Syria and Turkey makes it the world’s deadliest quake since 2011, when an earthquake in Japan triggered a tsunami, killing nearly 20,000 people. The year before that, over 100,000 people were killed by a magnitude 7.0 quake in Haiti.

They lifted slabs of cement with enormous cranes and smashed rubble with jackhammers. Then, they stopped. Silence.

Among the wreckage of a collapsed 14-storey building in the Turkish city of Adana, the shriek of a whistle pierced the noise every few minutes on Wednesday. Rescue workers hollered for quiet, and listened for any hint of voices from the debris. Hundreds of people watching hushed.

During one moment of digging, volunteer Bekir Bicer uncovered a crushed birdcage, he said. Inside was a blue and yellow bird, alive after nearly 60 hours.

“I was very happy. I nearly cried,” Bicer said. “The cage was broken, but the bird was still inside.”

Friends and family of those who remained trapped under the rubble sat beside fires, waiting for a miracle even as the survival window was closing.

Suat Yarkan, 50, said his aunt and her two daughters lived in an apartment on the building’s fourth floor. They would have been home asleep when the quake struck. He was desperate for hope that they could be rescued alive

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