Heroic rescuers give their all to save lives in massive quake

Relatives found her still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord. One of them, her cousin in fact, cut the cord and took the child to hospital.

The four storey building from which she was rescued is just a wreck. She had been with her parents, four siblings and an aunt.

It will be sometime before we know the story of this little one’s immediate family and if any of them with her under the rubble of their wrecked home survived. A doctor caring for her is quoted as saying `had she been left for an hour more, she would have died’.

A story such as this brings back to me the horrors of our own Troubles, in particular the Omagh bombing on 15th August, 1998 which killed 29 innocent people. One was an expectant mother of twins who also died. The perpetrators were the IRA. And no, they will never be forgotten or forgiven.

The scale of those who died in these two episodes is very different of course. The earthquake was a freak of nature and would never have been stopped by man. Everyone knows earthquakes bring disaster eventually. A quake had hit that area a century ago and there had been occasional rumblings over the years indicating that the place was not safe. With this known knowledge why was this area built up with high rise flats and commercial buildings?

The dreadful Omagh bombing on the other hand was a deliberate act and the town has physically recovered but most of us will remember what we were doing that day and where we were when such evil was perpetrated. The hapless victims of this deadly earthquake this week can blame mother-nature only.

It could take many years before the people of this devastated area of Turkey/Syria recover. They will be totally dependent on foreign aid to re-build – if indeed that area is not abandoned altogether as being too risky. And how will they track down the developers who most likely took no cognizance of the dangers of building high-rise in such a dangerous area? Money can bring out the evil in people who don’t care who they hurt so long as they are filling their bank accounts.

One national newspaper with extensive coverage of the disaster suggested that `Turkey should explain where £4bn earthquake tax was spent in 20 years’. This levy was `temporarily introduced to reinforce infrastructure’ but then became permanent. Was it used instead to build roads as one Turkish journalist suggested?

The horror of being buried alive under masses of concrete can only be imagined. When Belfast was bombed during the 2nd World War my father was in the sand business and one of his jobs was to supply sand for the re-building of the parts of the city that had suffered in the bombing. To do this he had to drive his tractor loads of sand from Lough Neagh to the city and back each day. I was born just after the war in 1946 and in later years I remember him re-counting the effort it was, especially on wet days, and how little money he earned but he knew it was his duty to make the effort for the people who had suffered so much.

There are fortunes to be made in the restoration of this disastrous part of Turkey and Syria. I doubt all the money for it will go into the re-building.