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Earthquake Rescue — Learning from Disaster

For fire and rescue professionals, every damaging earthquake should be looked upon as a sort of library, a storehouse of lessons for those in search of them. "It’s a sad reality that many lessons from contemporary quakes are actually a rehash of those that should have been gleaned from past events," says Larry Collins, an Los Ange­les Fire Captain and Search Team Manager of the LACFD’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force.

Earthquakes have confronted man since the day he first walked on the earth. Few things strike fear in our shared psyches as when the ground beneath our very feet suddenly (and without warning) erupts into violent motion, raising mountains and flattening build­ings in an instant. Fear of earthquakes is practically universal; shared by people from disparate cultures in different parts of the world that have no other common ground.

One of the worst single natural disasters of the 20th century oc­curred when the North Anatolian Fault segment southeast of Istan­bul ruptured on August 17,1999 in the Izmir region. During the past century eight segments of the North Anatolian fault have ruptured in a progressive sequence from east to west, causing nearly 100,000 fatalities. In the aftermath of the August 1999 quake, which tragi­cally fulfilled their expectations, the same scientists now anticipate continued westward progression of devastating earthquakes along the North Anatolian Fault.

The "next” (westward-trending) segment begins near the 1999 epicentre and extends beneath the Sea of Maramar, paralleling the shoreline within 15 miles of Metropolitan Istanbul. This bodes ill for Istanbul, whose buildings, infrastructure, and dense population are extremely vulnerable to earthquakes.

Long-Term Survival in Collapsed Buildings

For fire/rescue personnel who know better through hard expe­rience and observation, one of the most disturbing factors about earthquakes is the general reaction of the public, the media, and even some emergency professionals who exclaim "miracle" every time people survive after being trapped for several days in collapsed buildings in the aftermath of disastrous earthquakes.

Naturally, the average person may see large buildings collapsed into piles of rubble, often with layers of floors pancaked down upon one another, and automatically assume that noone could have sur­vived. This is why the rescue of trapped victims from such build­ings — sometimes many days later — is almost universally characterized as "miraculous". The fact is most people don’t expect survivors after the first day

But to the trained eve of firefighters and members of urban search and rescue teams, it should be assumed (until proven otherwise) that many collapsed buildings will be honeycombed with void spaces. The evidence to support this view is indisputable: in Mexico City, many live people, including infants in a collapsed hospital, were res­cued alive after more than a week of entrapment.

Following the 1988 Armenia quake survivors were rescued after nine days. One man lived after being extracted with a broken ankle and dehydration following thirteen days of entrapment in a hotel collapsed by the 1992 Philippines quake.

The lesson here is this: In the aftermath of a disastrous earth­quake, decision-makers (including Incident Commanders, civil and military authorities, and politicians) should be cautioned against halting or delaying search and rescue operations until all void spaces have been checked, until the selective debris removal stage of col­lapse rescue has been completed, and until all hope of survival has passed.

Understanding Seism icily

In order to facilitate the development of effective earthquake plans, emergency planners and other decision-makers will find it advantageous to possess a basic understanding of the local seismic hazards, including the location, frequency, and magnitude of earth­quakes that may be expected to result from the rupture of local faults. Just as a competent firefighter understands basic science in order to accurately anticipate the behaviour of fire, so should fire/rescue pro­fessionals understand enough about seismology to link ground mo­tion with possible damage to the community and, therefore, remain better prepared to manage those consequences.

One model of interdisciplinary collaboration between fire/res- cue professionals and scientists is found in Southern California, where urban search and rescue technicians from the County of Los Angeles Fire Department and other public safety agencies have de­veloped close contacts with seismologists from the California Insti­tute of Technology and the University of Southern California (via the Southern California Earthquake Centre), in order to ensure that earthquake planning and training is consistent with the true seismic hazards. Among members of the local fire/rescue services, this is leading to a better understanding of the forces that drive the seismic disasters that periodically strike Southern California. It is a relatively new partnership that will enhance the planning process for earthquakes that are certain to strike the region. The old adage "know you enemy" is an appropriate analogy here.

This collaboration has also helped seismologists to gain a better understanding the needs of emergency responders (e.g. probabili­ties of future seismic events and their possible magnitude, advanced warning systems, rapid identification of the location and magnitude of ground fault rupture in order to rapidly deploy resources, etc.). As a result, we are finding that there are ways in which seismolo­gists and other earth scientists can enhance the ability of fire/rescue agencies to react to earthquakes.

Experience and Training

The level of experience required to properly evaluate rescue op­portunities and conduct effective search and rescue in collapse dis­asters is a rare commodity. Collapse rescue training courses provide the basis for this expertise, but nothing beats hand-on experience conducting emergency operations in actual collapse disasters ranging from earthquakes to explosions.

Consequently, well-organized teams of highly experienced res­cuers are often a rarity at earthquake disasters around the world, and locals are often left to their own devices, which may include the most basic tools and methods, which aren’t necessarily applicable for locating victims in void spaces, stabilizing the collapse, tunneling through the collapse, or lifting heavy materials from collapsed buildings.

In many cases, emergency responders lack the experience to recognize that people may be trapped alive within piles of rubble and in­side badly damaged buildings. As a result untold numbers of trapped victims have been abandoned for dead when officials prematurely declared an end to the Search and Rescue phase and the beginning of the so-called "Recovery Phase". Make no mistake — in a disaster, the term Recovery Phase is often shorthand for "we are going to begin bulldozing buildings with heavy equipment without regard for the potential of survivors trapped within them".

Planning for Sustained Search and Rescue Operations

In many recent earthquake disasters, some officials recommend­ed ending search and rescue operations (and transitioning to "recov­ery") after just a few days, even when fire/rescue professionals were certain that more people remained trapped alive in collapse build­ings. Experienced fire and rescue professionals are often frustrated by this tendency to hurry from "rescue" to "recovery". Emergency officials should be planning to pull live victims from the rubble up to three weeks after catastrophic earthquakes, and they should be prepared to sustain non-stop search and rescue operations until all hope of locating viable victims has passed. The public has the right to expect this level of response to devastating quakes.

During the void space search phase, well-trained and equipped firefighters and USAR task forces tunnel their way through the building using special tools, rope rescue, mining and tunneling, and structural stabilization methods. They use fiber-optic and Ground Penetrating Radar technology, special search cameras, extremely sensitive acoustic and vibration sensing instruments, search dogs, and direct visual and voice contact to locate victims trapped within void spaces created when the structure collapsed.

In many cases, firefighters and other rescuers must squeeze through cracks and void spaces, crawling through the interior of collapsed buildings in order to positively determine whether victims are trapped. This is an extremely hazardous (but essential) duty.

After all known survivable void spaces are searched, selective de­bris removal begins. During this phase, the firefighters and USAR task forces work closely with heavy equipment operators, structural engineers, construction and demolition contractors, and others to take the building apart piece by piece, usually from top to bottom. As upper layers of the buildings are selectively peeled away like an on­ion, additional void space search operations are conducted in order to check newly accessible parts of the building for potential survivors.

In many cases (especially in large buildings), void space searches with selective debris removal (or combinations of both) should con­tinue until the entire buildings has been dismantled and all possi­ble survivors located and extracted. These operations are extremely dangerous because of the instability of damaged buildings, as well as the continuing aftershocks that accompany major earthquakes.

Without proper training, equipment, and experience personnel conducting these operations can cause the building to collapse, kill­ing rescuers and victims alike.

The Need to Plan for National and International Earthquake Response

If nothing else, recent earthquakes have demonstrated one lesson that we all should heed: no single government has all the answers or all the resources to manage the worst earthquake disasters likely to strike in the future.

In the face of these facts, modern fire/rescue agencies in quake- prone areas around the world have a responsibility to maintain due vigilance, and should redouble efforts to improve their earthquake response capabilities.

Government should strive to foster these efforts, as well as im­prove the manner by which resources are shared in the event of cata­strophic earthquakes.