The main thoroughfare feels like a construction site that sprawls out, block after block after block. But instead of putting up buildings, crews of workers, cranes, bulldozers and excavators are digging through the rubble of those that have collapsed in the hard-hit Turkish city of Adiyaman.

Residents said rescue crews and aid were initially slow to arrive after Monday’s powerful earthquake, which killed more than 21,000 people in Turkey and nearly 4,000 in neighbouring Syria.

The crews now pack the main roadway.

Rescue workers from other cities, groups of miners who have come from other parts of the country to help and uniformed soldiers stand atop piles of rubble and rest on the grassy median, warming themselves with wood fires that choke the air with smoke and sipping lentil soup made by volunteer kitchens.

Adiyaman was badly damaged, with a number of buildings on each block along the main street now on the ground, far too many to count. Many others have cracked windows and walls, and none of them appear to have any inhabitants.

Various distribution points are now giving out prepared food, diapers and baby formula.

In an empty dirt lot, volunteer pharmacists set up an open-air pharmacy to hear residents’ complaints and look at their medical records before fetching the proper pills or syrups from the stacks on folding tables behind them.

At a medical tent next door, doctors offer free consultations to anyone who walks in.

The most common complaints are wounds from shattered glass or falling bricks, respiratory illnesses exacerbated by the cold weather and diarrhea from the lack of potable running water for the droves of homeless people, said Dr Firat Erkmen, the head of the Sanliurfa medical association, which sent a delegation of volunteers.

Despite the influx of work crews and aid, life is still an enormous struggle for themany newly homeless residents.

“We are basically in the street,” said Melek Goclu, 25, a mother of three who had come with her family to pick up some food and clothes.

“We move according to the sun.”

With her were her husband, Ali, a construction worker, and her three young sons, ages 8, 6 and 1, the last one crying in his stroller.

Estimates of the dead from Monday’s earthquake were nearing 25,000 in Turkey and Syria, officials said on Saturday. But as hopes fade for finding more people alive in the devastated region, that figure is expected to rise considerably with rescue workers turning to recovery and excavation.

Some 900,000 people in the region are thought to be without shelter, UN officials said.

New York Times News Service