An Israeli rescuer who helped in the 1999 earthquake returns to Turkey to save lives

MARASH, TURKEY – Lt. Col. (Res.) Golan Landsberg is a veteran of search and rescue work, having participated in nearly a dozen Israeli missions around the world over the past 25 years, including two in Turkey in 1999 after massive earthquakes that hit the country in August and November of that year.

Landsberg, commander of the IDF Home Front Command’s search and rescue unit that landed in Turkey earlier this week, said the devastation caused by those earthquakes 24 years ago was similar to the devastation that devastated large swathes of the country on Monday. , and perhaps a little worse, though he admits this may have been colored by his lack of experience from that time.

“That may be my view because I was younger and less experienced, but it looked like a huge, colossal disaster – similar to what we’re seeing here today – but from my view, it was even bigger. However, when you go out into the street here, in the middle of the affected area, the It’s like the destruction I saw at the time,” he told The Times of Israel Thursday morning.

Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the August 1999 earthquake, similar to the death toll from Monday’s magnitude 7.8 quake so far, although both are an underestimate.

Landsberg and his unit are part of a large Israeli delegation that landed in Turkey this week to assist in the initial search and rescue efforts and are now preparing to open a massive field hospital to provide large-scale medical care directly to these people. Monday’s earthquake injured and ordinary patients in order to reduce the burden on Turkish hospitals.

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They landed in southern Turkey early Tuesday morning and made their way to Marash, one of the cities hardest hit by the quake, where they immediately set to work.

For the first day and a half, Landsberg worked around the clock in Marach, moving from site to site, pulling people out of the rubble.

Lieutenant Colonel Golan Landsberg speaks to members of his search and rescue unit in southern Turkey, on February 8, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)

“Last night was my first night here on the base. Before that, I was working around the clock in various locations,” said Landsberg, a reserve officer who usually works as an executive for Hewlett-Packard in Israel.

As of Thursday evening, Israeli rescue teams have pulled 17 people out of the rubble, including a number of children. Landsberg said his team played a role in many of them, either in the initial stages or in the eventual extraction. This included the rescue of a two-year-old boy who was pulled from the rubble on Wednesday. He also led the eventual bittersweet rescue effort to extract a husband and wife from a collapsed building.

Together they are trapped under the rubble. Both were alive, and they managed to get the man out, but unfortunately, he died on the way to the hospital. After about 12 hours, we were able to get the wife out and she was fine. It was one of the most complex rescues we’ve ever had. “They required a lot of medical attention,” he said.

As of this writing, it has been more than three and a half days since the first quake in the predawn hours of Monday morning. As time goes on, the odds of finding people alive under the rubble are getting smaller and smaller, especially as the freezing nights put those trapped inside at greater risk of exposure and hypothermia.

“From previous experiences, we know that weather conditions have a significant impact on survival. Very high temperatures and very cold temperatures, as expected, are not very beneficial for survival. However, the temperature varies under the rubble. If it is You have the right socket and you haven’t had a serious injury, you might survive for a few days.”

“We’ll probably have a few days, maybe a week, when we’ll still fit, but the chances are slimming down considerably. I think a few days from now we’ll need to wrap up our search efforts.

IDF search and rescue teams begin work to try to find survivors after the earthquake that struck Turkey on February 7, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)

Meanwhile, Landsberg is looking to maximize his unit time, deploy quickly, and find locations that have the best chances of extracting people alive.

“We’re always thinking, ‘What’s going to be the next mission,’ because time is of the essence and you want to make sure that you’re super efficient, that you don’t wait. If you can act, you act. You don’t want to wait. Waiting is a waste of time,” he said.

There is no shortage of search and rescue teams working in Marash. The earthquakes devastated entire neighborhoods, flattening entire apartment buildings, and severely damaged buildings still standing.

While rescuers are working on a site, civilians will try to grab them and get them to help extricate someone from a nearby building. But in some cases, people are trying to get help to recover the bodies of those killed in the avalanche, not the living people. While this work is extremely important, it is outside the purview of search and rescue units. How do they know the difference?

The way we do it is we use mostly human intelligence, so to speak. We interview people and listen to what people ask us to do. But we’ve been going over that with our various sources, and we’re trying to focus on the places where we know for sure there are people alive inside because we want to be efficient,” he said.

IDF search and rescue teams work to find survivors after an earthquake in Turkey on February 8, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)

In the coming days, Landsberg and his unit will finish their work and return to Israel, making room for medical personnel and other professionals suitable for the kind of work that comes after the immediate rescue effort.

“That’s the norm for us in terms of this kind of mandate. We ramp up quickly because our early hours are critical. So we deploy quickly with much less heavy equipment and fewer people. The field hospital” will follow. They will move more slowly, but with a greatly increased capacity [for medical care] They will leave later.”

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