In the Turkish town of Osmaniye, the sound of silence is something no one wants to hear.
This community of 250,000 people was badly damaged by the earthquake with dozens of buildings and offices reduced to disorderly heaps.
Hundreds of people have been consumed by the rubble and their friends and family members are desperate to recover them.
They know it will take a lot of activity.
In a small corner, not far from the center, we heard the roar of heavy machinery, large diggers with shovels, removing debris.
Then a member of a search and rescue team silenced them all when he called for silence at the site.
“All is quiet,” he shouted. A hundred people did as they were told.
Another rescuer called into the cracks between the broken concrete slabs. “Can you hear me? Tap the wall if you can hear me.”
But his desperate questions went unanswered – the sound of silence weighed heavily on all of us.
Five blocks of flats occupied the area but they had all fallen into circular heaps.
Residents were sleeping when the earthquake struck and it seems unlikely anyone survived.
“Looks like a lot of people lived here?” I asked a local resident called Frut Soycan.
“When you look at this area, I would say there were around 150 people living here, but we cannot be absolutely certain, only Allah knows,” he replied.
“Do you think anyone could have survived?”
“Those people we have already found were dead. But if we find anyone alive, there are ambulances here waiting to take them away.”
Hope was fading and the outlook was bleak.
We listened to the anguished tone of onlookers, desperate for a piece of light.
A man shouted furiously at a search and rescue team as they stood quietly on a pile of rubble.
A woman began to cry, her frustration revealed in an explosion of emotion: “Yesterday, the governor came here, just to be seen, but he does nothing.
“There are children in these buildings, three-year-olds and five-year-olds, but they don’t do anything.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Osmaniye residents want activity, they need search and rescue supplies and specialists at hundreds of sites across the city.
And they want to hear the sound of people pulled from the wreckage, the cheers, the roars and the joy of family gatherings.
Silence is a state few wish to contemplate.