Death toll from Turkey and Syria earthquakes tops 25,000
The death toll from this week's earthquakes in Turkey and Syria have now topped 25,000. Rescue teams from around the world continue to battle through freezing temperatures to search for additional survivors. Turkey's government, meanwhile, says it's distributed millions of hot meals and provided temporary housing for tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the earthquakes. But says it is struggling to reach everyone in need. NBC's Matt Bradley joins me now. Matt, when we tried to reach you earlier, you couldn't speak. You had to be silent in the last hour because of rescue efforts.
Explain what exactly happened. Yeah, well, this happens intermittently, Corey. And I've been here since Monday, and this has regularly occurred. We don't love it when it happens on air, but we can't control that. Of course, we're on their schedule. They are not on ours. So what happens is these rescue workers, and in this case, we moved, actually, this is more looks more like a demolition job at this point.
But these rescue workers, they're still trying to keep everybody quiet in order to listen to what's going on underneath the rubble. They're expecting to hear voices, and they rightfully are expecting that because earlier on in the week, after the initial earthquake, there were a lot of voices that were heard underneath the rubble. People were quite literally ordinary people, mothers, fathers, elderly people using their bare hands. They told them, do this, lifting up concrete blocks, just crawling through rubble and pulverized concrete, trying to get to the voices underneath. A lot of people died because they weren't reached in time. Now, there are people, even five days later, who are still alive underneath the rubble. We just heard of a little girl who was taken out here in Turkey just a couple of hours ago last night.
My crew and I, we were not here. We were in a town called Adyaman, which is about a two-hour drive from here in Gaziantep. And it was an extremely dramatic several hours. We watched as a mother and her daughter. We thought it was a mother and her two children, but we later learned that one of the children had died. They were both dug out of the rubble by a Turkish crew that was also helped, wading in the wings, kind of, by an American crew who were from Northern Virginia and from LA County, working under the direction of USAID. Now, this went on for hours and hours.
And actually, the interesting thing, one of the interesting things about this, besides the incredible endurance that was showed by the mother and her daughter, was the fact that this was led not by rescue workers, but by Turkish coal miners. So they treated this site as if it was a coal mine. We watched them splitting wood and using that in order to set up kind of an entryway that would look like a traditional coal mine almost out of a cartoon. And that's what they used to get inside. Once they were inside, once they reached this family, it was the Americans who stepped up and started helping with medical advice and medical equipment, saline solution, that kind of thing. It was a couple of hours before finally they got the mother out. The daughter was quite a bit more tricky.
She had what we were understood to be a massive chest wound. And this was something that, of course, moving somebody like that is a very sensitive and delicate affair. But she also came out eventually, and we understand both of them are now recuperating in hospital. Corey? Just incredible news and images there. Thank you for your reporting, Matt. We appreciate it.
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