(WSVN) - A South Florida tennis player is stuck in Turkey, as the country digs through the devastating disaster.
Her South Florida family is hoping for her safe return, but with many airports closed in the area, there’s no clear answer when she will return home.
Her mother is worried, as she saw images coming out of Turkey.
Thousands of buildings crumbled and collapsed, thousands of people died, and her daughter is right in the middle of all of it.
“It’s just been nerve-wracking because you just, I mean, I’m worried about her right now sleeping,” siad Gayal Black, Tyra Black’s mother.
Hurricane Tyra Black plays professional tennis, and she was in Turkey for a tournament.
Gayal woke up in the middle of the night in Delray Beach feeling something was wrong. When she turned on the TV, she saw the images of the aftermath following that catastrophic quake.
She then spent hours trying to get someone on the phone.
“Your heart just drops out from your insides,” Gayal said. “You don’t know what’s wrong. You don’t know if they’re injured, if they were in a building during the night when it happened.”
After about three hours, she finally spoke to her daughter and learned she was OK and, in fact, had slept through the earthquake.
Gayal said she has called Tyra throughout the day since the quake.
“Oh, every hour,” she said. “Sometimes she just ignored me.”
But that changed when the second quake hit, when Tyra was awake and at lunch.
Gayal called Tyra so she could explain what it was like.
“I thought I was dizzy or something, I felt everything shaking,” Tyra said. “Everything at lunch started moving. People started running out.”
Tyra said they spent the day outside not sure where to go, not sure where was safe.
“We saw the videos online about how things started collapsing all over Turkey and everywhere, so we did not want to leave,” she said. “We were scared to go inside. We didn’t know what to do.”
Tyra has since been allowed back into her hotel, and the mother and daughter together are now wondering what to do next.
“Is that couple of stories going to fall down? You don’t know,” Gayal said. “Everything around is just crashing to the ground in rubble.”
“We’re just trying to figure out if it’s safe to go home, go to the airport, any of those things right now,” Tyra said.
According to Tyra, the closest airport to her has a crack in the runway, and she needs to fly out of there to get to Istanbul.
Only then can she return to South Florida.
Copyright 2023 Sunbeam Television Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.