By JAMES GLANZ
Published: May 15, 2008
Among professional search-and-rescue teams, the first 24 hours after an earthquake or a building collapse are known as “the golden hours,” the time when frantic clawing by neighbors, friends and relatives can pull survivors from the periphery of the rubble.
But once those precious hours pass, rescuing survivors becomes a technical exercise best handled by specialists, say members of search-and-rescue teams and other experts in the field.
Those experts say that the most effective efforts include structural specialists, who suggest places where pockets deeper in the rubble could be harboring the dwindling number of survivors. The teams also use highly trained dogs and sophisticated listening devices to help pinpoint those locations. Once such areas are located, the rescuers use heavy equipment to punch through walls while stabilizing the precarious structure.
Such needs raise questions about the likely effectiveness of the tens of thousands of soldiers being sent by the Chinese government to undertake search-and-rescue operations in the vast zone affected by the earthquake that struck Monday.
It is unclear how many specialists are also working on the effort, but experts say it would be impossible for them to deal quickly enough with all sites where buildings have collapsed, especially since some areas are remote. Among the tens of thousands of people still missing, 26,000 are believed to be buried in the debris.
“The reality is that in an event like the one we just had, there isn’t enough capacity in the entire world to get the entrapped victims out and out quickly,” said Richard Eisner, who from 1984 to 2006 was regional administrator of north-central California’s Office of Emergency Response.
Still, he said, if the searches are done improperly, they will not only fail to find many survivors, but could endanger the rescuers.
“Once you’re beyond the edge of the structure, you are at risk yourself,” Mr. Eisner said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, pointing to the instability of partly collapsed buildings. To be successful at that point, “you need everyone from doctors to structural engineers.”
Creating teams with the right mix is difficult, said Bryan Juncosa, a structural specialist on the New Jersey Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue team, who combed ground zero after Sept. 11, 2001.
“Search and rescue is very specialized and very sophisticated now,” said Mr. Juncosa, who is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, which analyzes major building collapses and the rescue efforts. “We have technology and training that are able to locate survivors and get them and the rescuers out without injury,” he said.
Some of those rescue efforts suggest that the Chinese soldiers could find themselves overmatched. After the 1994 earthquake in Southern California, known as the Northridge earthquake, rescuers detected a man who had been cleaning a parking structure when the temblor occurred and the structure collapsed, Mr. Eisner recalled.
That was just the start of the operation: the rescuers then had to punch through a reinforced concrete wall while stabilizing the structure from further collapse. Firefighters injected special foam to prevent the ignition of spilled fuel. It was not until midday that the man was brought out, alive, though in critical condition, Mr. Eisner said.
Nearly all successful rescues in the Loma Prieta earthquake in California in 1989 and the Kobe, Japan, earthquake in 1995 came during the first day or so, Mr. Eisner said; after that, even the professionals had little luck.
Even the extrication of bodies after the first hours can be a difficult operation, said Mr. Juncosa of the New Jersey search-and-rescue team, which was involved in taking a dead man out of the collapse of a parking garage in Atlantic City in 2003. A recovery team had to burrow horizontally, punch through two collapsed and precarious floors and then remove mounds of crumbled concrete from over the man, Mr. Juncosa said. The entire operation took as long as eight hours.
Unless they are knowledgeable in those techniques and properly outfitted, the soldiers in western China could find themselves with an insurmountable task, said Chris Rojahn, executive director of the Applied Technology Council, a nonprofit group based in Redwood City, Calif., that sets standards for reducing earthquake, wind and flood hazards.
“I think it would take some trained, technical people to go in and do it right,” Mr. Rojahn said. “I don’t think a layman could understand it.”