Maltese rescuers in Turkey dug through a mountain of debris from a collapsed 14-storey building to find a single earthquake victim and were sometimes joined by family members digging through the rubble themselves.

The world had watched in horror on February 6 when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, wiping out countless cities and claiming the lives of at least 45,000 people.

But while the best some of us can do is send our donations and keep those affected in our thoughts, members of Malta’s civil protection department geared up and travelled to Turkey to help.

Speaking to Times of Malta, CPD officers David Cassar and Jonathan Callus recounted how, as they coordinated recovery efforts, victims’ relatives were right there beside them, jumping at the chance to dig through the rubble themselves.

“This was rather challenging because in Malta we have the authority to keep the family at a distance but over there we couldn’t,” Callus said.

“It was a bit distracting because they were right there with us looking through the site and we were concerned for their safety as well as ours.”

32 CPD officers pulled out 18 bodies

Devastatingly, the team of 32 CPD officers pulled the bodies of 18 people out of the rubble and were able to return them to their grieving loved ones. They did not manage to find any survivors. “In their culture, a dead person is just as important as a living one,” Callus continues.

“It’s not quite like that in Malta, where we prioritise saving the living over the dead. It’s not that the dead aren’t important to recover, because they are, but we evaluate the situation and if I find a person who is alive and speaking to me I’m going to prioritise them.

“Over there, once they realised that you’ve found something, they almost rush you and the work we ended up doing was mostly search rather than recover.”

Describing the aftermath of the earthquake as “devastating”, Cassar observed that the country simply could not keep up with the sheer volume of destruction and collapsed buildings.

'Rescuers racing the clock to find survivors met with freezing temperatures'

“Our goal is always to save lives but in this case, we didn’t manage,” he said solemnly.

“There are different reasons for this. While our response was prompt, the state of the 18 bodies we pulled out suggests that the cold made things worse. Any chance of making it out alive after the earthquake was reduced by the cold.”

Rescuers who were racing the clock to find survivors were being met with freezing temperatures at many of the disaster sites, with the region experiencing a cold snap of some 5-10°C below the norm for this time of year.

Regardless of this, Callus says that rescuers always go in hoping for the best, despite the enormity of the task they face.

“We go in with the mindset that there is still hope.

'Pulling out 10 bodies is not something we have ever experienced in Malta'

“We didn’t see anything that we’re not used to, simply on a larger scale. Pulling 10 bodies out of one building is not something that we have ever experienced in Malta.”

Callus and Cassar also described digging through an enormous pile of rubble to pull out one person, whose wedding album they then gave to his wife.

“It was a 14-storey building that had collapsed on one side. You can imagine there was a considerable amount of material to go through to look for one person,” Cassar said.

“In this case, others had already spent 30 hours looking through the building and when we got there we located the apartment in less than four hours.

“We even retrieved the wedding album of the person we were looking for and gave it to his wife. She was very grateful and after this, we won their trust.”

Despite their hardships, the people of Malatya were eager to help the officers, bringing them food and starting bonfires to keep them warm, Callus said. Some erupted into chants of “Malta! Malta!” whenever they saw them.

“These people are going through so much and yet they still go out of their way to take care of you. It’s a phenomenal human experience,” he said.

Despite all their training, Cassar said it was hard not to feel for the people experiencing such widespread suffering.

“When I got home I did not feel quite right, like something was weighing on me,” he said.

“I isolated myself and in private I even cried. It did leave an impact on me. I experienced a sadness that I just had to express.”

Callus said that while he was happy to be back with his family, he felt a pull to remain in Turkey.

“As happy as I was to be back with my family, to a certain extent I wished I could stay there, which is hard to explain,” he said.

“It might be selfish, but I knew that while my family was safe, in Turkey there was more that we could give.”