05 October 2009

U.S. Rescuer Describes Earthquake Relief in Izmit, Turkey

Audio by Bob Zoldos of Fairfax, Virginia

The speaker is a battalion chief with the Fairfax County Fire Department talking about the search-and-rescue process after a devastating earthquake in Turkey in 1988.

(begin transcript)

We were pretty much given the city of Izmit. That was shocking to us because we had never worked something that large before, and our team manager at the time divided it up. We sent out search teams. They went and found us some places to work, and we ended up being busy for several days. So it was a good mission that way. And we made some good rescues, which was wonderful. So they do vary on how these things go, but once we get into the search teams [we] find some people.

The first part is detection. That’s when we’re just trying to determine whether someone may be in the building, and once we find out that they’re there, the detection can be done by the dogs, our canine — our search canine. It can be done by some listening devices that we have, which are seismic. They actually hear vibrations. Once we’ve detected a person that’s trapped inside a building, we’ll then go to a location mode where we’ll use our cameras, and then a physical search of the building to find where they’re at, and then we start to work to unearth, untomb or extricate them from whatever they’re in. That’s the actual — where we’ll tunnel to the victim, if you will. We’ll work to remove them and then treat them while they’re in the space and then transport them in conjunction with local officials.

In Turkey, we went right into what we call blitz mode. That means every person works until we can — until there’s either no more work or we’ll end up putting a crew down [allowing a crew to rest] for a little while and then rotating them back in. We went for 56 straight hours in Turkey, the first Turkey [earthquake], working until we put anyone down. We were getting to the point there where we really were as exhausted as a human can go. And we were hitting that area where we wouldn’t have been safe any farther. But there were still live rescues. The team has always been very clear that if there’s live rescues, we’re not going to put people down, because as long as they can safely work on a site, we’re gonna do it.

(end transcript)