The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria have shaken both countries

THE silence was the most unbearable part. Every quarter of an hour the bulldozers and cranes digging through the debris stopped working so that rescuers could hear the screams of people trapped underneath. There were none—only the sobs and prayers of onlooking relatives and friends. The rubble was all that remained of a 14-storey building in Adana, a city of 1.8m people in southern Turkey. A few hundred metres away the scene repeated itself. Another crowd, another apartment block reduced to a mound of concrete pancakes.The full scale of the devastation caused by the twin 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6th remains unknown. As of early February 9th, the death toll had already reached 13,000 in Turkey alone. In Syria it had passed 3,000. Those numbers were bound to rise far higher. Across the disaster zone, hundreds of bodies were being pulled from the rubble every hour, with only a few survivors being found. Rescue teams had excavated only a fraction of the 6,000 buildings in Turkey that had collapsed.