Chances of finding survivors dwindle a week after Turkey-Syria quake: UNICEF official

Efforts to provide emergency aid are continuing in full force a week after Turkey and Syria were struck by a catastrophic earthquake.

The 7.8 magnitude quake struck on Feb. 6, reducing large sections of towns and cities to rubble. The death toll has surpassed 35,000. Many survivors are hungry and hundreds of thousands are homeless, as temperatures dip below zero.

David Morley, the president and CEO of UNICEF Canada, said it's unlikely that rescue teams will find anyone else alive under the debris, amid harsh conditions this many days after the disaster. 

Morley spoke with Information Morning Nova Scotia host Portia Clark on Monday about the relief effort that's underway. Their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and length. 

What's the situation on the ground in Turkey and Syria?

One of the things that's hardest for people is that it's cold. It goes below freezing at night. And as we know, there are millions of people who have lost their homes and so at night time, they're having to find any place where they can get warm. In the day, it gets up to about 10 degrees, but it's chaotic. People have lost their houses and it's frightening. It's frightening just thinking of a place like Halifax, if one-fourth of the buildings had been destroyed, it's scary for everybody.

Where are people going to survive those very cold nights, and of course the days as well?

Our people have set up in places like football stadiums, in mosques that are still standing, in schools that might still be standing but these places weren't built to accommodate people like this. And so that means for us at UNICEF, there's the issue of worrying about sanitation facilities, getting enough clean water to people and also child protection, because for kids who may have been separated from their parents or their extended family, they're at greater risk when everybody is living together in a in a huge situation like this.

Tell us more about that, David. It might not be as well known, but those children are vulnerable in a number of ways.

Absolutely. Now at a time like this, in chaos like this, when kids have lost their parents or are separated from their parents, is a time when children are preyed upon and child trafficking can happen. And so UNICEF social workers are already working with local child services to find kids who have been separated from their parents to make a safe space for those children and then do our best to try and locate their parents if we can. But of course with so many people having been killed, we don't know if we'll be able to find their parents, but we'll be able to find some extended family.

So folks are trying to survive. They're also dealing with incredible grief, and those questions about where their family or their friends are, and how their neighbourhoods and communities have been affected during all of this.

In northwest Syria, a child who's 12 today, say, grade six, all they've known is war, and now this.… It's hard for us to comprehend what it means for those kids. We're doing our best to make sure they get clean water and simple things like soap and hygiene kits and diapers for little kids. But we're also trying to have child-friendly spaces, just a place where kids can go and play a little bit. At least it's a respite from this, from the horrors that they're seeing. It's not only the material goods that we're having to get, it's how we provide psychological support to these kids.

As far as the material goods and the medical supplies, how is that being obtained and then brought to the people who need them?

We had a lot of goods pre-positioned so that we've been able to get blankets and jackets, etcetera. We have water engineers who have been checking out the systems of the various towns and fixing them if we're able. And if we're not, we have been able to get some trucks with clean water coming in so that the clean water can start to be distributed as well as basic medical supplies, which we had already in Jordan and Lebanon. UNICEF has the world's largest network of humanitarian supplies around the world. So we're drawing on that too, and we're trying to purchase more so that we can get more in through the routes that we're able to use.

Are our supply-chain issues affecting even that? We've heard so much about that in other areas over the past couple of years.

We've been able to because we've had so much stuff pre-positioned. We've been able to get things in from other parts of the world at the moment. But we need money to be able to buy more, and some we're able to buy locally still in Turkey and Syria. Like bottled water. That is so basic, but if we don't have clean water for people to drink, then there's a greater risk of getting cholera and other diseases starting up as well.

So as always in these situations, money is the most useful for UNICEF?

Yes, absolutely we are appealing for money. Canadian people have been extremely generous over this past week. People can go to unicef.ca and make a donation there, and we'll use it to buy supplies and provide psychological support for these kids.