Even as hopes of reaching survivors began to fade, rescuers in the Turkish city of Izmir pulled a young girl out alive from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building on Tuesday, four days after a strong earthquake hit Turkey and Greece.
Wrapped in a thermal blanket, the girl taken into an ambulance on a stretcher to the sounds of applause and chants of “God is great!” from rescue workers and onlookers.
Health Media Fahrettin Koca identified her as 3-year-old Ayda Gezgin on Twitter and shared a video of her inside the ambulance. The child had been trapped inside the rubble for 91 hours since Friday’s quake struck in the Aegean Sea and was the 107th person to have been pulled out of collapse buildings alive.
Rescuer Nusret Aksoy told reporters that he was sifting through the rubble of the toppled eight-floor building when he heard a child’s scream and called for silence. He later located the girl in a tight space next to a dishwasher.
The girl waved at him, told him her name and said that she was okay, Aksoy said.
“I got goosebumps and my colleague Ahmet cried,” he said.
Her rescue came a day after a 3-year-old girl and a 14-year-old girl were also pulled out alive from collapsed buildings in Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city.
Meanwhile, death toll in the earthquake reached 104, after emergency crews retrieved more bodies elsewhere in the city.
The U.S. Geological Survey rated Friday’s quake at 7.0 magnitude, although other agencies in Turkey recorded it as less severe.
The vast majority of the deaths and some 1,000 injuries occurred in Izmir. Two teenagers also died and 19 people were injured on the Greek island of Samos, near the quake’s epicenter in the Aegean Sea.
Officials said 147 quake survivors were still hospitalized, and three of them were in serious condition.
