Dutch canine team finds four people alive under rubble in Turkey

A Dutch canine rescue team found four people alive under the rubble in Turkey nine days after the country and Syria were hit by massive earthquakes.

Rescue organization RHWW reported on Twitter that one of its teams pulled a father and son alive from the rubble. On Tuesday night, the team reported finding another two men. All four people had been under the rubble since the earthquakes struck, the organization said.

Earlier this week, an RHWW team also found a 13-year-old girl alive in a collapsed building.

The RHWW deployed nearly 30 people and 18 dogs to help search the rubble in Turkey. The teams arrived in the region on Sunday evening and joined the search for missing people around noon on Monday.

The Dutch team USAR helped with the search and rescue operations last week. That team pulled 14 people and a dog from the rubble.

The Netherlands is holding a national fundraising day for those affected by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria on Wednesday. When the fundraising day started this morning, Giro555 - set up by a coalition of aid organizations - had already raised 28.6 million euros.

Minister Wopke Hoekstra of Foreign Affairs also said earlier this week that he would look into accelerating the visa process for people affected by the quakes like Germany and Belgium said they’d do. But the Netherlands first wants to focus on acute aid in the form of rescue teams, he said on WNL Op Zondag.

On Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that visa applications from people in the Turkish earthquake region who want to stay with family in the Netherlands for a short time would be handled with priority. Visa applications usually take weeks to months to process, Nieuwsuur reported. The Ministry already received a few hundred applications from the earthquake area.