A 17-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble in Hatay, Turkey, on Monday after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake devastated Turkey and Syria last week. his part in it.
Mike Leum, a deputy director of the LA County Sheriff’s Department, tweeted the news and said the teen was “unharmed and talking”.
For the record:
11:12 PM February 13, 2023An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Mike Leum was part of a rescue team for the Los Angeles County Fire Department in Turkey.
Leum told The Times that he and his fellow volunteers “got some sleep after a long (but great) day.”
A separate LA County team flew to Turkey last week to assist with earthquake relief efforts. On Wednesday morning, the team had arrived in Adiyaman city to begin rescue work. That team was sent by the US Agency for International Development, along with another from Virginia, in response to the devastating earthquake and aftershocks.
The death toll from the February 6 earthquake has topped 35,000.
Officials have said the search for survivors is likely nearing its end.
Seven days after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake, a crew pulled a 4-year-old girl from the rubble in hard-hit Adiyaman. The rescuers who recovered the girl were among thousands of local and foreign teams, including Turkish miners and experts, aided by sniffer dogs and thermal cameras, who searched pulverized apartment buildings for signs of life.
Seismologists have been warning Californians for years about the dangers of the kind of massive earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria. “There will be 7.8 seconds in our future. Absolute. We’ve got the faults, we’ve seen it in the past, it will happen again,” said seismologist Lucy Jones, a research associate at Caltech.
The Associated Press contributed to this report