A Bulgarian surgeon operated on a man under the rubble of the disaster in Turkey and spent hours between the collapsed concrete slabs before rescuing the victim. Again, Bulgarians from the “Cave Rescue” team rescued a woman last night who spent 135 hours under the rubble.
At the end of this video, a quiet voice is heard saying in Bulgarian “This gives you hope, doesn’t it?”. For 3 hours, rescuers searched for a woman among tons of concrete.
“It wasn’t very clear exactly where she was, as you can’t tell by sound alone in the destroyed building how far she was and exactly what floor she was on. She explained that she was lying pressed somewhere between the slabs of the building. It was 5- storey building, but in reality it was 4-5 meters high and between the slabs of the floors the distance was 50-60-70 cm. As everything between them is crushed and full of garbage. And we entered a gap between the slabs, expanded somewhat there, imposed to remove some old furniture. and from there we already checked what direction the sound was coming from. The heavy equipment guys started digging through the roof. Drilling through the top slab and another slab below it to get it out. It looked good at first, after they already put her on the stretcher and took her out. There was cheering, there was great joy, because already on the 7th day, taking out alive people is less common,” says Vladimir Georgiev, “Cave Rescue”:
24 Bulgarians in the most dangerous places. Where no one else wants to go. They work both day and night.
“Earthquakes occur here 10 times a day, 3rd, 4th degree, even 4.9, 5.1 reached last night. In this case, we are all wearing helmets, visors, with special clothes that help us, right? in general, tears, stains. All this luggage on the ground is also our camp, but they simply didn’t provide us with tents or anything. We went around the stadium 4 times until we finally found a place ourselves,” Dimitar Hristov, “Cave Rescue”, told BNT .
300 kilometers away, in Besni, where hopes are also buried under tons of rubble, a doctor crawls into a tunnel with his Polish colleague to operate on a trapped man.
“It’s in a crevice. On a fallen four-story building, slab on slab. Like the tunnel was stabilized, But it was scary because there are aftershocks and the moment you climb you can be trapped. It took 7- 8 meters to crawl. There is hardly a person who is not afraid in such situations, but despite everything, I still came to help people. And the moment I reached the person, when I saw that he was in a helpless state , that fear was dulled. From then on, as the adrenaline starts raging in you, you think in a slightly different way. I saw that the hand, that part was not vital, which was pressed. And my opinion was that it should be amputated . Actually, the intervention itself was carried out quickly, without any problem. And the person was transported to their health facility,” says Dr. Veselin Yolov, an anesthesiologist at the Medical Institute of the Ministry of the Interior.
