Survivors of Turkey's devastating earthquake struggled to warm themselves yesterday amid a downpour that turned the ground to mud and heightened the urgent need for solid shelter.
Rescue work was coming to an end, as scores of foreign teams packed their tents and gear to pull out of the earthquake zone in the northwestern province of Bolu.
The official death toll rose by 100 overnight to 547, with some 3,300 injured in Friday's quake, the second in three months, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale.
The departing international rescue teams spoke of limited success in rescuing people, with low temperatures shortening the time people trapped under rubble could survive.
Average winter temperatures in the mountainous Bolu province drop well below freezing point. Winter rainfall is heavy.
"It seems there are no chances of finding anybody alive, so we were asked to leave. We think that is the right decision," said Mr Gerd Friedsam, a German team leader.
On the south side of the Asar stream running through the ruined town of Duzce, there was little evidence of state provision for the hundreds of homeless.
"We used to warm ourselves by a fire," Ms Asli Aktas, a mother of two, said from inside a makeshift hut of wood and plastic sheeting which could not shut out the damp and cold. "We lit it this morning but the rain put it out."
She had rescued a coal stove from her wrecked home and lit it inside the flimsy hut. "What can we do? We're freezing."
There was little sign that food distribution, active in the town centre, was reaching this poor suburb.
A government minister acknowledged the government was struggling to provide tents for the homeless from Friday's earthquake on top of an estimated half a million lacking shelter after the devastating August earthquake nearby that killed more than 17,000.
"We have to be realistic. It is hard to shelter 80,000 people," the State Minister, Mr Hasan Gemici, said. "Right now there is nowhere in the world to get tents. We've got the money but there are no tents to buy."
Authorities said they had provided more than 11,000 tents and some 170 tonnes of food. Six thousand soldiers were involved in the relief operations, alongside more than a thousand medical personnel and nearly 500 ambulances.
But many earthquake victims in outlying areas, frustrated by bureaucratic hurdles, said they were left to their own devices.
"We are freezing and it's going to get colder. I don't know what the future holds for us," Ms Hatice Guven (65) said in Duzce. "We have seen no help from the state. May God help us."
Her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren huddled under plastic sheeting on a pavement opposite their one-storey house, scarred by deep cracks in the walls and now uninhabitable.
President Clinton, his wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea visited tents sheltering victims of the August earthquake and urged them to "keep your spirits up".
They visited a tent camp in Izmit in northwest Turkey, set up by US marines, where 9,000 survivors live in 1,200 tents.
As rain fell on several hundred survivors, Mr Clinton, speaking from a raised platform on a central passageway in the tent city, promised the US "will do everything we can to help you until your lives return to normal".
On Monday, he pledged the US would make $1 billion in loans to Turkey for that purpose.
Mr Clinton is in Turkey ahead of a European security summit in Istanbul on November 18th-19th. Organisers say the summit will go ahead despite fears the city could be hit by a major earthquake.
Seismologists say a fault line running south of Istanbul is one of the few sections in the northwest that has not shifted in the recent activity. They say movement on the stretch is likely but cannot predict when or how powerful it will be.
Such announcements have sparked widespread fear among already traumatised residents of the south of Istanbul, many of whom spent Monday night outdoors. The Turkish Prime Minister, Mr Bulent Ecevit, urged seismologists not to fuel the fears.