ANTAKYA (Reuters/AFP) -- Turkey stepped up work to clear away rubble from collapsed buildings on Monday, as rescue work wound down two weeks after major earthquakes killed more than 46,000 people in southern Turkey and northwest Syria.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said that nearly 13,000 excavators, cranes, trucks and other industrial vehicles had been sent to the quake zone.
The death toll in Turkey had risen to 41,020, the AFAD said, and it was expected to climb, with some 385,000 apartments in the country known to have been destroyed or seriously damaged and many people still missing.
Among the survivors of the February 6 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria are about 356,000 pregnant women who urgently need access to reproductive health services, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency (UNFPA) said at the weekend.
The women include 226,000 in Turkey and 130,000 in Syria, about 38,800 of whom will deliver in the next month.
It said many of the women are sheltering in camps or are living exposed to freezing temperatures, and struggling to get food or clean water, putting their health at risk.
In Syria, already shattered by more than a decade of civil war, the bulk of fatalities has been in the northwest. The area is controlled by militants at war with the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has complicated efforts to get aid to people.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday said Turkey would build almost 200,000 new homes in the country’s southeast region, devastated by a massive earthquake two weeks ago.
He said around 118,000 buildings either collapsed, required urgent demolition or were severely damaged by the quake.
He promised reconstruction work would begin in March to build 199,739 homes, including more than 130,000 in the worst-affected provinces of Hatay, Kahramanmaras and Malatya.