Gruesome, technical work: How an earthquake search and rescue mission is conducted

A collapsed building is a “hostile, horrific” place to be trapped, retired firefighter Rob Davis says.

The people who are currently buried alive under rubble in Turkey and Syria will be experiencing traumatic injuries, hunger, thirst, sub-zero temperatures, dust that makes it difficult to breathe, the risk of fire breaking out from damaged gas pipes or drowning in water from burst water mains.

It’s Mr Davis’s job to get them out.

The 52-year-old will travel to Turkey today with other members of SARAID, Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters.

In his 20 years with SARAID he’s seen his share of disasters: the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Sri Lanka, the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes in Haiti, the 2020 Beirut explosion, the Mozambique floods in 2000 and Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake.

For people who haven’t witnessed these kinds of natural disasters first-hand, the scale is a “gruesome” shock, Mr Davis told Sky News.

“You’re literally driving down roads and buildings have just been ripped apart. You see the impact that has on the survivors who are in complete shock, scared, don’t know what to do next.”

More than 5,200 killed – live updates after Turkey-Syria earthquake

Reaching the trapped

The scale of devastation in Turkey and Syria is huge. The World Health Organisation estimate 23 million people have been affected and believe fatalities could rise to more than 20,000.

That makes coordination a massive part of the job. SARAID will be coordinating other international search and rescue teams and carrying out assessments of buildings, looking at what the building was being used for at the time of the quake, how many people would have been inside, what damage has been done and the likelihood of people being alive.

The teams prioritise buildings where a lot of people were at the time of the earthquake, such as hospitals.

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Then the search starts. The teams will use search dogs, sensitive sound location equipment, camera systems that look into voids, drones and ground penetrating radar – as well as their eyes and ears.

Mr Davis said they’ve had “surprising” success “just using your own senses on a building”.

“In Pakistan we rescued an elderly gentleman by just calling for complete silence and listening, and we found this gentleman tapping away under the rubble.”

Rescuers will drill a pilot hole to locate trapped people and then use drills, disc cutters and heavy breaching equipment to break through the concrete in a controlled way, Mr Davis said. Once they’ve got the casualty out, they’re handed over to the medical team for assessment and treatment.

The ‘window of survivability’

The chances of survival diminish as time passes, with a number of factors affecting people’s chances.

“Is the person traumatically injured? That will have an impact on the length of survivability. Is the void they’re in stable? Is the aftershock going to cause more collapse and subsequently more injury?

“The weather conditions is a massive one – it’s very cold, hypothermia will set in for some of these people. Lack of water, food.

“It’s the rule of threes, isn’t it? Three [minutes] for lack of oxygen, three days for lack of water and 30 days for lack of food.”

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The “window of survivability” is normally five to 10 days, Mr Davis said. It will be up to the national emergency management agency – in this case the Turkish government – to determine when the search and rescue phase will end.

After that has ended, teams may then be asked to work to recover the dead and repatriate them to their families.

Mother ‘just wanted her children back’

The decisions they have to make over who should receive help can be tough to communicate.

Mr Davis recalls an emotional scene in Pakistan in 2005: “One afternoon I had a young mum beating on my chest and saying her children were trapped under the building, would we rescue them? And through the interpreter I had to ask a very difficult question, which is, ‘I’m really sorry to hear this, but are your children alive or dead?’

“And she said, ‘they’re alive, I can hear them’, so we asked her to lead us to the building. When we got there, the children were dead.

“She just wanted her children back, and I didn’t blame her.

“We get this at every major deployment. We’ve sometimes got to be very sensitive, but quite strong and just say ‘I’m sorry, I’m not here at this time to recover dead bodies. I’m here to try and find people that are alive.'”

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Working in ‘gruesome’ conditions

Rescuers will be working in incredibly difficult conditions. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Mr Davis spent 15 hours working on a school that was completely destroyed. They searched for survivors surrounded by the bodies of about 50 children aged five to 11.

“People have been killed in masses underneath these buildings and, of course, they’re still there. So as gruesome as it is, they are starting to decompose.

“The smell of death was pretty horrific.”

The SARAID team will arrive in Turkey two days after the earthquake struck, part of the 76 specialists, four search dogs and rescue equipment being sent by the UK government.

It’s likely there will be rescues into next week, Mr Davis said, and they will be working “24 hours a day”.

“If there are people to be found, we’ll find them with the skill set and the equipment we’ve got,” he said.

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