Inside the struggles of Turkey’s earthquake response

Reuters :
Kevser said she could hear her two sons trapped beneath the rubble of their collapsed apartment building in the Turkish city of Antakya but for two days she was unable to find an emergency response leader to order their rescue.
“Everyone’s saying they’re not in charge. We can’t find who’s in charge,” she said on Tuesday last week, standing on a downtown street where at least a dozen other buildings had collapsed. “I’ve been begging and begging for just one crane to lift the concrete.”
“Time’s running out. A crane, for God’s sake.”
Adile Isik reacts as she waits for her 21-year-old son to be rescued from a collapsed building, in the aftermath of the deadly earthquake in Adiyaman, Turkey Feb 12, 2023.
When Reuters returned to the street a day later, neighbours said no more survivors had been pulled from the wreckage of the building.
Many in Turkey say more people could have survived the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck the south of the country and neighbouring Syria a week ago if the emergency response had been faster and better organised.
Reuters spoke to dozens of residents and overwhelmed first-responders who expressed bewilderment at a lack of water, food, medicine, body bags and cranes in the disaster zone in the days following the quake – leaving hundreds of thousands of people to fend for themselves in the depths of winter.
The death toll from both countries on Sunday exceeded 33,000, making it among the world’s worst natural disasters this century and Turkey’s deadliest earthquake since 1939.