L.A. team rescues teen buried in rubble of Turkey earthquakes

A 17-year-old male was rescued in Hatay, Turkey, on Monday with help of the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s Urban Search and Rescue team that is assisting in rescue operations after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake devastated Turkey and Syria last week, according to officials.

Mike Leum, a longtime volunteer search-and-rescue leader and assistant director for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, tweeted out the news, saying the teenager was “uninjured and talking.”

Leum told The Times that he and the team were “going to get some sleep after a long (but great) day.”

The L.A. County team flew to Turkey last week to assist with earthquake relief efforts. By Wednesday morning, the team had arrived in the city of Adiyaman to begin rescue work.

The U.S. Agency for International Development sent the team along with another from Virginia in response to the destructive earthquake and aftershocks.

The death toll from the Feb. 6 earthquake is above 35,000.

Officials have said the search for survivors is likely near its end.

A crew wrested a 4-year-old girl from rubble in hard-hit Adiyaman, seven days after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck. The rescuers who retrieved the girl were among thousands of local and overseas teams, including Turkish coal miners and experts aided by sniffer dogs and thermal cameras, who scoured pulverized apartment blocks for signs of life.

Seismologists have been warning Californians for years about the dangers of the type of massive quake that devastated Turkey and Syria. “There will be 7.8s in our future. Absolutely. We have the faults, we’ve seen it in the past, it will happen again,” seismologist Lucy Jones, a research associate at Caltech, said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report