Two children were pulled from the rubble in a Syrian village after more than a day-and-a-half wedged between heavy slabs of concrete.
A newborn baby girl was rescued in another village, still attached by a dust-coated umbilical cord to her mother, who must have died after giving birth.
In a Turkish city of more than two-million people, rescuers scaled the ruins of a six-story apartment building and began dangerously digging down through concrete and metal and wood to reach a family of six who they believed were alive. Using saws and drills and a long metal hook, periodically shouting for “silence” so they could try to communicate with whomever was trapped, they extracted four of them alive, one by one. The father, the mother, the young twins.
Two more boys, 11 and 12, could not be found.
These are among the stories from reporters and photographers on the ground in the wreckage of Monday’s earthquake. Stories of heartwarming miracles among hellacious heartaches. But each miracle is a human life saved, so no miracle is small. But neither is the heartache. By the latest count, there are more than 17,000 dead, well over 60,000 injured, and countless tens of thousands out in the cold, homeless. And with conditions so crude, equipment so scarce, roads so impassable, rescuers so isolated, they won’t really know the final numbers for many days more. If at all.
But what we do know is, as each night fades into the dawn that follows, those numbers will only grow. The reality is, given the nature of an earthquake’s upheaval, many still living are hurt too gravely to survive, and for anyone still alive but impossibly trapped, time is running out.
Soon, the only numbers that will grow are the dead.
That’s what I have seen in earthquakes I’ve covered, the impossibility of survival as the injuries and, with winter weather taking no break for human agony, the elements take their toll.
I’ll never shake the memory of the poor souls I’ve seen who didn’t survive, but I’ll also never lose the memory of the miracles I’ve seen with every earthquake, and one stands out among them all. It was after a quake that killed some 2,000 people in Italy. I started my report for ABC that night saying, “Somewhere down there is a woman named Lisa.”
It was Day Three after the earth shook, and shortly after landing our helicopter in our second or third hilltop village of the morning, we heard a man shouting from atop a huge pile of rubble, then saw him frantically gesturing downward. He was shouting in Italian, but one member of our team knew the language and said, “He thinks he’s found someone alive.”
He had indeed. We scrambled with our camera gear to where he was at the top of the pile, which had once been apartments, and spent the next six hours there. Here’s how I wrote about it in Life in the Wrong Lane:
“The rescuer who had shouted that first alarm had heard a squeal— just a tiny, weak squeal, but it sounded human. It was. It was a woman who, we learned before the end of the day, had been buried about six feet down, trapped by concrete and thick wood beams, the body of her dead sister on top of her.
“For those six hours, we watched and recorded as rescuers got her out. They had to work painstakingly slowly. This pile of rubble was a house of cards; move the wrong stick or stone and the whole precarious pile could collapse, burying not just the survivor but the rescuers and, incidentally, us.
“Over time, the squeal came more often and eventually got louder. Rescuers delicately opening a passage to the trapped victim were getting closer and closer. But in all those hours, we never saw the woman; we only heard her. The only other noise was the dramatic sounds rescuers made as they warily snapped thin twigs and lifted small stones, wondering whether each would be the one to cause this pile to collapse upon itself.
“One rescue worker came up from the hole, his face cut to shreds, but said, ‘I touched Lisa’s hand, my blood doesn’t matter’.”
We didn’t see Lisa until the very end, when she was pulled from the hole and rushed to an ambulance waiting alongside the rubble, but we had heard every squeal, and every twig broken in the path to her crypt. An earthquake kills thousands with a monstrous blow. A single life is saved by small acts of heroism.
This week, miracles across hundreds of miles in Turkey and Syria haven’t mitigated the tragedy of the earthquake.
But for the brief moments when a newborn is saved in one village, a pair of young children in another, a family of four is lifted to safety— just for those brief moments— little else matters.
That’s how it was in Italy. Thousands died, but somewhere down there was a woman named Lisa, and she was alive.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
This made me cry, Greg. Thanks for the glimmer of hope.
I can only imagine what you’ve seen first hand. Thank you Greg