In Kahramanmaras, close to the quake's epicentre in southern Turkey, there were fewer visible rescue operations amid the smashed concrete mounds of fallen houses and apartment blocks, while ever more trucks rumbled through the streets shipping out debris.
The death toll kept growing - exceeding 25,250 across southern Turkey and northwest Syria. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, facing questions over earthquake planning and response time, has said authorities should have reacted faster.
Erdogan promised to start work on rebuilding cities "within weeks", saying hundreds of thousands of buildings were now uninhabitable, while issuing stern warnings against any people involved in looting in the quake zone.
In the Turkish city of Antakya, several residents and rescue workers said they had seen looting.
In the rebel enclave of northwest Syria that suffered the country's worst damage from the earthquake but where relief efforts are complicated by the more than decade-old civil war, very little aid had entered despite a pledge from Damascus to improve access.
In Antakya, body bags lay on city streets and residents were wearing masks to try to cover the smell of death. Ordinary people had joined the rescue effort, working without official coordination, said one who declined to give his name.
"There is chaos, rubble and bodies everywhere," he said. His group had worked overnight trying to reach a university teacher calling to them from the rubble. But by morning she had stopped responding to them, he said.
"There are still collapsed buildings untouched in the side streets," he added.
At one building in Kahramanmaras, rescue workers burrowed between concrete slabs to reach a five year-old girl, lifting her on a stretcher, wrapped in foil, and chanting "God is great".
They said they believed two more survivors were clinging on under the same mound of rubble.
But though several other people were reportedly saved from the rubble on Saturday including 13 year-old Arda Can Ovan, few rescue efforts now result in success. A woman who was rescued on Friday in Kirikhan in Turkey died in hospital on Saturday.
The danger in such operations was evident in a video filmed in Hatay in Turkey, showing a partially collapsed building suddenly slipping and burying a rescuer in an avalanche of debris before his colleagues could haul him out.
About 80,000 people were being treated in hospital, while 1.05 million left homeless by the quakes were in temporary shelters, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters overnight.
UN aid chief Martin Griffiths, who described the earthquake as "the worst event in 100 years in this region", praised Turkey's emergency response, saying it was his experience that people in disaster zones were always disappointed early in relief efforts.
He said in an interview with Sky News that "I am sure (the death toll) will double or more".
Monday's 7.8 magnitude quake, with several powerful aftershocks across Turkey and Syria, ranks as the world's seventh-deadliest natural disaster this century, approaching the 31,000 killed by a quake in neighbouring Iran in 2003.
With a death toll so far of 21,848 inside Turkey, it is the country's deadliest earthquake since 1939. More than 3500 have died in Syria, where death tolls have not been updated since Friday.
