Nearly 40 killed in Turkey avalanches

ANKARA: An avalanche has slammed into a mountain road in eastern Turkey, wiping out a huge team of rescue workers sent to find people missing in an earlier avalanche.

Officials said 33 emergency workers were killed, 53 were injured and others are still buried under the snow. Wednesday’s avalanche increased the overall death toll from the disaster to 38. Some 300 emergency service workers were called to a road near the mountain-surrounded town of Bahcesaray in Van province, which borders Iran, after an avalanche struck late on Tuesday. That snow slide killed five people and left two missing.

At around noon on Wednesday, the team was struck by the second avalanche. Turkey’s emergency and disaster management agency AFAD said 33 bodies were recovered from the mass of snow on the steep slope.

Earlier, governor Mehmet Emin Bilmez said the dead included eight military police officers, three government-paid village guards, three firefighters and nine volunteers. Emergency teams were still searching for other colleagues under the snow, Bilmez said.

He did not provide a figure of how many more could be missing. Some 30 emergency workers were either pulled out of the heap of snow or escaped themselves and were taken to hospital, the Interior Ministry said. Video from the scene showed at least three overturned vehicles at the bottom of a hill during a snowstorm.

Some rescuers were struggling to climb out of a steep incline while others dug frantically into the snow with shovels and pickaxes. Fog, heavy snow and strong winds were hampering the rescue efforts.

The head of AFAD’s operations in Van province, Osman Ucar, was among those injured. Speaking from his hospital bed, he said he was dragged along with an excavator that was toppled by the sliding snow. “I was half-buried,” he said, adding that he escaped on his own. The first avalanche buried a snow-clearing vehicle and a minibus.