Experts say that given the amount of time that has passed and the severity of the building collapses, the window for rescues has nearly closed as the desperate searches for earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria enter their final hours.
According to Eduardo Reinoso Angulo, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Engineering, the chances of discovering survivors are “very, very small now.”
The odds weren’t great to begin with, according to David Alexander, a professor of emergency planning and management at University College London.
He claimed that many of the structures were constructed so poorly that they crumbled into tiny fragments, leaving very few spaces big enough for people to survive.
“If a frame building of some kind goes over, generally speaking we do find open spaces in a heap of rubble where we can tunnel in,“ Alexander said. “Looking at some of these photographs from Turkey and from Syria, there just aren’t the spaces.”
Winter conditions have also reduced the window for survival.
In the cold, the body shivers to keep warm, but that burns a lot of calories, meaning that people who are also deprived of food will die more quickly, said Dr Stephanie Lareau, a professor of emergency medicine at Virginia Tech in the United States.