Turkey and Syria earthquake offers early lessons and remindersExBulletin

Members of a search and rescue operation are active, Sunday, in an area that collapsed during the earthquake that struck Antakya, southeastern Turkey. Disaster recovery experts say ordinary people matter to save lives. Bernat Armangue/AP .

Caption switch Bernat Armangue / AP

Members of a search and rescue operation are active, Sunday, in an area that collapsed during the earthquake that struck Antakya, southeastern Turkey. Disaster recovery experts say ordinary people matter to save lives.

Bernat Armanji / Associated Press

In the immediate aftermath of a devastating earthquake, where someone is trapped in their collapsed home or office building and waiting for help, the first people to help will likely not be trained professionals.

“The people who will have the biggest impact on your rescue will be your neighbors. Because they’re the ones right there, when it happens,” Forrest Lanning told NPR. He is an earthquake and volcano response coordinator with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and a structural engineer.

No matter where in the world an earthquake or other type of emergency hits, Lanning and other emergency and disaster response experts say, people should know that effective help often comes from the immediate community.

It’s one of the many lessons experts draw from studying disasters like the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that devastated large areas in Turkey and Syria.

Spreading this awareness and training people to respond when official rescuers cannot do so are among the measures that emergency response experts say are necessary to save the most lives in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

“Events like this are absolutely devastating, of course, but they remind us of the importance of scientific research and of putting that research into action through building codes and retrofits.” [infrastructure]enforcing policy and things like sharing knowledge to create best practices,” Lindsay Davis, director of the USGS Disaster Assistance Team, told NPR.

Rescue workers continue to remove rubble from collapsed homes in Sarmada, Syria, at the border crossing with Turkey, on Sunday. Hussein Mulla/AP .

. Hussein Al-Mulla/Associated Press

Rescue workers continue to remove rubble from collapsed homes in Sarmada, Syria, at the border crossing with Turkey, on Sunday.

Hussein Mulla/Associated Press Usually there aren’t enough search and rescue teams to save everyone

Experts say the rising death toll – more than 39,000 in Turkey and Syria – reflects how crucial search and rescue efforts will be within the first 12 hours to two days.

The window of opportunity to rescue people trapped under collapsed buildings “will start to close very quickly and by the fourth or fifth day, it’s over,” Lanning said.

Even if a bystander can’t pull someone out of the rubble, they can still identify areas of responders where people are located, said Natalie Simpson, professor and chair of university operations and strategy management at the Buffalo School of Management.

She added that response efforts will be prioritized at locations where bystanders have already found people alive.

“It takes so long in every building that you have to listen and carefully remove bits of building debris to get to people,” Lanning said. With the scene in Turkey, he added, “there are thousands and thousands of these buildings.”

Lanning said this is made even more important by the fact that international teams take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to arrive. In general, nowhere are there enough local search and rescue teams on the ground to respond to every collapsed building.

Such was the case in Samandağ in Turkey where civilians were digging through rubble trying to save family and friends in the aftermath of the earthquake. The Guardian reported that after several hours, a small group of rescuers arrived and were exhausted.

Knowing the importance of rapid local assistance, the US Community Emergency Response Team was developed, a FEMA program that trains volunteers in all 50 states in basic disaster response skills.

Lanning said he teaches people what to do after a major earthquake, where to get water after an emergency, how to check for immobile neighbors, and how to search collapsed buildings.

There are factors, such as the types of injuries and the number of search and rescue teams on site, that contribute to how likely a trapped person is to survive. He noted that if a trapped individual is uninjured or has minor injuries, it can last up to a week under a collapsed building.

And miracles happen. Reuters reported on Tuesday that seven survivors were rescued from the rubble in Turkey, more than a week after the first earthquake.

Deploy the army immediately

Simpson of the University at Buffalo said she wishes every time disaster struck that rescue crews and the military would immediately mobilize. This is not always the case, she said, and it was not the case in Turkey and Syria.

The Turkish government has been criticized for its response. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan admitted that “on the first day we had some inconveniences”, but on the second and third days he insisted that “the situation was under control”.

Hüseyin Seyferoğlu, 23, is pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Antakya, Turkey, on Sunday. Petros Giannakouris/AP .

. Petros Giannakouris / AP

Hüseyin Seyferoğlu, 23, is pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Antakya, Turkey, on Sunday.

Petros Giannakoris / AP

“The biggest point of failure in emergency response is the failure to recognize the fact that this is an emergency,” Simpson said. The instinct is to wait for more information.

“With the emergencies, all of them, including the aftermath of the earthquake, you are no longer in Kansas,” she said. “These are not normal conditions and so one of the traps we fall into is, ‘Oh my God, what’s the best thing to do in this moment?'” Stop it with “the best”. It’s all right. Let’s move on.”

She added that in many regions around the world, including Turkey, the military is best equipped to act in a scene that turned into a disaster and open airstrips to get help quickly.

But the Turkish government failed to mobilize its military immediately to assist in direct rescue efforts or to establish those field hospitals and airstrips, according to an analysis published by the Middle East Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

Simpson said that Turkey is an earthquake-prone area and will always be subject to massive devastation.

“There’s a very important lesson here: It’s never too early to activate your response at scale when you’re not getting any information from an area,” she said. “I think that will influence decision-makers elsewhere, and that will help people in the future.”

This is also a reminder, Simpson said, to: “Activate your army immediately. The sooner you do it, the better off you’ll be.”

Mitigation and prevention are crucial to avoiding future disaster

Citizens stand next to a collapsed building in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, on Sunday. Emrah Gurel/AP .

Caption switch Emrah Gurel/AP

Citizens stand next to a collapsed building in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, on Sunday.

Emrah Gurel/AP

“While search and rescue operations are important, the research is very clear that mitigation and prevention are most effective when it comes to minimizing disaster losses,” said Davis of the USGS.

It shows what is lost when action is not taken to reduce the risks to homes and civilians in earthquake-prone areas of Turkey.

This latest disaster, Lanning said, underscores how important it is for global communities in earthquake-prone regions to strengthen infrastructure to withstand a disaster like the one in Turkey and Syria.

The major earthquakes that hit Turkey in 1999 and 2011 served as important lessons for officials that building construction in the country needed to be retrofitted to face future disasters.

“A lot of the damage there is because of the type of construction and the type of buildings,” said Lanning, who has worked for 15 years in different parts of the world that are prone to earthquakes, and most of it is concrete.

This despite knowing that concrete buildings are not the best at resisting earthquakes. He said they are easy to build and can easily hide imperfections.

Much work will come of analyzing this latest disaster and what went right or wrong in the following months and years. It’s incredibly valuable work, Lanning said.

“Earthquakes make us more prepared. They make us more prepared and more resilient,” he said.

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