In scenes reminiscent of the rescue work that followed the devastating earthquake in Turkey last month, teams yesterday dragged a woman from the debris of a factory demolished by Tuesday's deadly earthquake in Athens - a feat that raised hopes of finding more survivors yet.
After being buried in the rubble for 45 hours, Ms Evi Sophilou was brought up to the land of the living by French rescuers. There were scenes of high drama as her husband, a well-known television reporter, desperately tried to boost the 30-year-old secretary's morale during the nine-hour ordeal to release her from the rubble.
When she emerged, disoriented and exhausted, hundreds of emotional Greeks who had rushed to the site - where some 25 people are still believed to be buried - cheered. With the death toll rising - last night it stood at 83 men, women and children - there were fears that time was running out for the 50-odd people still said to be underneath buildings around Athens.
The factory was among more than 100 structures, including multi-storey apartment blocks, that were levelled during the 10-second quake, which measured 5.9 on the open-ended Richter scale.
Yesterday, rescuers from Turkey, France, Switzerland and Germany , who have flown in to help the Greeks, were joined by a team from Israel amid renewed optimism that, after Ms Sophilou, more survivors can be found. So far 85 men, women and children have been pulled from the concrete slabs of buildings that in many cases collapsed like a house of cards. Last night, Athens's leading public prosecutor, Mr Giorgos Koliokostas, ordered an immediate investigation into whether rogue contractors were to blame for the deaths and destruction.
But with more than 20,000 residents now homeless, it is the scale of the damage wrought by the quake that has been most shocking. Yesterday, tent cities were being set up around the capital. Engineers inspecting buildings said they were shocked at the number they had been forced to condemn. In some working-class districts, far from the tourist attractions of the city centre, over 80 per cent of residences had been rendered uninhabitable , according to officials. "We've lost everything, everything," Ms Chryusoula Pitta said, as she sat on a blanket in a public park in Menidi, one of Athens's worst hit areas. "My home, it collapsed. It went just like that," she said, snapping her fingers to make the point. "I ran out just in time, I'm lucky to be alive," she murmured, trembling as she conjured up the memory. Government sources said it was still unclear how many "tens of thousands" of people were living outdoors following the quake and its more than 700 after-shocks. "Around 7,500 tents have been given out by the authorities so far," said the Interior Minister, Mr Vasso Papandreou, only hours before two more quakes - measuring 4.8 and 5.2 on the Richter scale - struck northern Greece yesterday. "The damage is very widespread, much worse than originally thought. It is not confined to the areas where we have had deaths. It could take months to calculate and years to repair."
The earth deep underneath quake-hit Greece and Turkey is fracturing like a pane of glass, increasing the possibility of further tremors in the region, a British seismologist said in London on Wednesday.
"It's a bit like a crack in a piece of glass. If you're moving a crack then you put all the stress at the end of a crack and it makes the next bit more likely to break," said Mr James Jackson of the Earth Sciences department at Cambridge University.