Looking for the lost

Quake families still searching for relatives two months on

- EMILY RETTER

Their grinding noise drowns out all else, and the vast cloud of dust they stir as they claw through the rubble fills your eyes and mouth with grit.

These are the diggers now working across southern Turkey to clear the wreckage caused by the 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes which hit here in the early hours of February 6, over two months ago, followed by some 11,000 aftershocks.

At least 230,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed here so the need to clear is urgent before rebuilding for the 2.3 million displaced people now living in tents and container homes begins.

But there was a moment last week, when the Mirror visited Antakya, Hatay, when the urgent work of one demolition digger halted abruptly.

All these weeks after the earthquakes shook 11 provinces here, killing some 50,000, as well as affecting parts of northern Syria and taking the lives of over 7,000 there, bodies were found amid the rubble.