Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, provided support to response efforts in Turkey following a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that has had devastating impacts in Turkey and Syria.
Personnel with Virginia Task Force 1, an urban search and rescue team based in Fairfax County, Va., boarded a C-17 Globemaster III at Dover.
The U.S. Agency for International Development said it was deploying urban search and rescue teams from both Fairfax and Los Angeles County that will coordinate with Turkish authorities and other responding organizations to provide life-saving assistance.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced that the death toll from Monday’s quake has reached 8,754. Combined with the 2,470 known deaths in Syria, that brings the total official death toll to 11,224.
The World Health Organization has suggested the final toll could rise as high as 20,000. A similar-sized earthquake in the region in 1999 killed at least 17,000 people.
Reuters reports that speaking to reporters in the Kahramanmaraş province near the epicenter of the earthquake, with constant ambulance sirens in the background, Erdoğan said there had been problems with roads and airports but that everything would get better by the day.
