The scale of the disaster in Turkey and Syria keeps growing

THE SILENCE is the worst part. Every quarter of an hour the operators of the bulldozers and cranes digging through mounds of debris stop working, hoping to hear the screams of people trapped underneath. There are none. Instead there are the sobs and prayers of the relatives, friends and other onlookers gathered below. The rubble is all that remains of a 14-storey building in Adana, a city of 1.8m people in southern Turkey. A few hundred metres away the scene repeats itself. Another crowd, another apartment block reduced to a mound of concrete pancakes.