Focus shifts to living as hope ebbs for Turkey's buried thousands

Rescuers searching for survivors of Turkey's massive earthquake have virtually given up hope of finding people alive and are switching their attention to providing shelter for up to 200,000 homeless.

The efficiency of the much-criticised rescue operation improved significantly over the weekend, but too late to save large numbers of people buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Experts say the chances of people surviving without water or food in such conditions after more than six days are tiny. Even so, at least 10 people were dragged alive from the remains of their former homes at the weekend.

They included a nine-year-old girl and a woman said to be 95 years old. Yesterday a 57-year-old disabled woman was rescued after 131 hours buried under the rubble in the town of Golcuk. French rescuers and Turkish soldiers freed her after detecting signs of life using special equipment.

The Government is expected to announce a further aid package for Turkey today, although it has not yet been decided whether this will take the form of financial assistance or urgently required goods, or both.

A number of the foreign search-and-rescue teams are returning home today. Japan's rescue emergency team left Yalova yesterday having found one person in over four days of searching.

Now this seaside town is turning into a gigantic demolition site, as bulldozers and heavy moving equipment comes in to flatten hundreds of collapsed buildings. The debris is being dumped in the Sea of Marmara.

The Turkish Red Crescent has erected hundred of tents for the survivors along the promenade, and the injured and sick are being treated in a field hospital operating from the local sports stadium. Many shops are planning to reopen today.

With the official death toll standing at 12,040, the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Co-ordination (UNDAC) team said it hoped to finish search-and-rescue operations in one-third of the disaster zone by last night.

"From tomorrow it will be a miracle [if we find survivors]," Mr Jesper Holmer Lund of UNDAC told reporters on Saturday.

More than 33,000 people have been injured and tens of thousands are still missing, believed trapped under the rubble of apartment blocks flattened when the quake hit the highly-populated north-west of the country last Tuesday. The UN says the final death toll from the quake, which measured 7.4 on the Richter scale, could reach about 40,000. Aftershocks were felt in Istanbul early yesterday.

Mr Lund put the number of homeless at between 100,000 and 200,000, adding that the building of tent camps will be the next big effort. About 100,000 buildings have been demolished or are uninhabitable.

Turkey's government, accused of being slow to react to the crisis, says it will provide sanitation, water and food at the camps. Fears of an outbreak of infectious diseases, however, appear to have diminished.

Turks sleep out of doors for fear of another night-time quake; WHO official plays down fears of epidemic: page 13. Aftershocks will be felt for years to come: page 14