ERCIS Turkey (Reuters) ? Turkey struggled to provide shelter on Wednesday to tens of thousands left homeless by an earthquake that killed nearly 500, and rescue teams began taking painful decisions to call off searches for those buried alive.
A 27-year-old woman was pulled out alive from a collapsed building in Ercis, the town hit hardest.
At another crumpled building in the town, rescue workers who had worked non-stop for more than 48 hours switched off their generators and lights, convinced no one was left alive.
Seconds later, they received word that someone trapped below had made contact on a mobile phone.
"There are three people trapped under there. When we lifted a concrete slab, the phone must have been able to get reception," said one rescue worker, as the lights were turned back on and his team returned to their job.
But hopes of finding more survivors were fading as time passed and temperatures fell to freezing, and attention was shifting to the Herculean task of providing shelter to the victims.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the death toll from the quake that struck mountainous Van province near the Iranian border stood at 461, with 1,352 people injured.
Sunday's 7.2 magnitude quake, Turkey's strongest in a decade, has spurred the government to request foreign aid, including from Israel despite tensions between the two.
The aid is to house families, amid growing complaints of a lack of tents and other supplies.
The governor of Van province said 3,000 buildings had collapsed or were made useless after the quake hit the region bordering Iran. He said damage was worst in outlying villages.
He estimated that 600,000 people had been "affected" by the quake, but said that did not mean all needed temporary accommodation. The exact number of homeless remained unclear.
Some desperate survivors fought among themselves for tents distributed by relief workers.
The Turkish Red Crescent said 17 trucks carrying food, blankets, carpets and warm clothes were looted, according to state-run Anatolian news agency.
"Some residents with no damage in their homes are unable to go back because of the aftershocks. That is why everyone wants tents. We estimate the total number of people affected is 600,000. To provide tents to this amount of people in one or two days is something no country would be able to do," Van provincial Governor Munir Karaloglu said.
"After the search and rescue efforts our biggest problem is housing. Our biggest need is tents for those citizens whose houses have completely collapsed," he told a news conference.
RESCUED
In Ercis, Gozde Bahar, an English teacher, was pulled out alive from the rubble. As she was being transported to hospital her heart briefly stopped. She was in critical condition.
"Of course I still have hope," Bahar's fiance, Hasan Gurcan, 29, said, looking dazed as he relayed the news on his mobile.
The rescue on Tuesday of a baby girl called Azra, born prematurely 14 days earlier, also lifted spirits.
"We have hope. There are always miracles. Normally, we do not expect anyone to survive after 72 hours but people have survived longer than that before," said a rescue official standing by the collapsed building where Azra was found.
But a senior rescue official told Reuters: "We have reached the bottom of the wreckage and searches are now over in the center of Van."
Having started out by saying Turkey could handle the disaster alone, Erdogan's government put out requests on Tuesday to 30 countries, including Israel, for emergency materials including prefabricated housing, tents and containers.
Israel, whose ties with Turkey hit rock bottom after Israeli commandos killed nine Turks on board a Gaza-bound flotilla last year, immediately said it was launching an airlift of supplies, starting with a shipment of prefabricated homes on Wednesday.
On a main street in Van rescue workers pulled out the dead body of a woman in her 20s from the flattened remains of a seven-storey apartment block.
"Our bride, our angel has gone," said a woman at the scene as the corpse was brought out, sealed in a body bag and taken away in an ambulance.
"We don't think there are any more bodies inside this wreckage," an official from the Ankara civil defense union said.
A woman named Emine said her family was sleeping in a car rather than in their home, its walls cracked by the earthquake.
"It's impossible to live in tents in Van. Look how cold it is and it is only October and now snow is on its way. We have a two-year-old child. What are we going to do with him?" she said.
At a makeshift field hospital in a sports hall outside Ercis, wounded and sick patients lay groaning on mattresses.
Orhan Acar, 30, was looking for his missing brother, Coskun, 25, who was in the center of Ercis when the quake struck.
"I have been looking for him the whole time since the quake but my hope is diminishing as time goes by," he said.
The disaster is one more curse for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in the impoverished southeast, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.
(Additional reporting by Mert Ozkan and Umit Bektas; writing by Ibon Villelabeitia, Daren Butler and Simon Cameron-Moore; editing by Andrew Roche)
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