TWO East Lancashire firefighters were today continuing the grim search for trapped casualties in the devastation left by the Turkish earthquake.

Station officer Andy Barnes and firefighter Mark Southworth, both based at Blackburn fire station, travelled to Izmit this week as part of the Lancashire Fire Service's search and rescue team.

They will be working with sniffer dogs to try and find and free people trapped in collapsed buildings. They are due to return to Lancashire on August 24.

The final death toll for the disaster is now being put as high as 45,000 and there are also fears of a typhoid outbreak.

Medical teams have begun immunising rescue workers, including British experts, as more decayed bodies were pulled from the rubble left by the quake.

An estimated 30,000 people are still missing - the vast majority believed to be trapped beneath the mounds of concrete and steel in what is left of tens of thousands of destroyed buildings.

With collapsed sewage systems and no running water or electricity in most towns and villages across the 160-mile quake zone, the World Health Organisation has urged the authorities to concentrate their efforts on helping survivors and not on burying the dead.

Experts have said most of those trapped in the rubble would probably only be able to survive for 72 hours - a deadline which passed yesterday, when only a handful of people were found alive.

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