Lives Saved: 12. Plus one dog and a canary. In the base camp of the Dutch rescue team USAD in Hatay, Turkey, successful rescues are recorded on a white board with a felt-tip pen. After seven days of searching, listening, jackhammering and breaking, that seems a paltry number, compared to the thousands and thousands more dead after the earthquake in Syria and Turkey last Monday.
Fourteen hours after the disaster, documentary maker Geertjan Lassche boarded a plane with the Dutch search & rescue team in Eindhoven. Nurses, a firefighter, a surgeon, paramedics, sniffer dogs. Trained and specialized in earthquakes and “other collapses.” A week after the disaster, the rescue team was back in the Netherlands, and became the documentary at breakneck speed Orange helmets in Turkey edited to broadcast Tuesday evening, the day before the nationwide fundraising campaign for the affected area, as great as the distance Amsterdam-Paris.
More times than the rescue team could save people, they had to decide to let people go, even when they heard signs of life under the mountains of concrete. The sounds came from too far, too deep, between the people and their liberation there were at least two collapsed floors. “Get a crane,” begs Tarik. His wife and children aged 13 and 7 are under the building. But a crane is not available, only a jackhammer and eight pairs of human hands that want nothing more than to dig. Team leader Marijn van Eijsden puts his hand on Tarik’s shoulder and says that rescue is impossible.
The team does not have access to heavier equipment. Their assignment is to perform “swift rescues.” The search is for “realistic collapses with a chance of survival”. If the sniffer dogs catch on, if human noises can be heard, if activity is seen, then “they set up an action”. Relatives cling to their orange coveralls, begging for help. But as the hours go by, the rescuers have to say more often: “No heartbeat, no breathing…sorry.” And: “We will continue.”
49 hours after the disaster, a rescue worker roars through a hole in the rubble. The sniffer dog jumps into the hole, followed by the man. First a girl appears, then a woman. In shock, but they are alive. A collapsed building further a voice is also heard. A woman. She is conscious. Before she is pried free, she receives an IV with pain relief. Her breathing stops, then her heart. That’s what happens to a human body when it’s freed after three days of being trapped.
Acetaminophen
Walking through the collapsed city, the rescuers find a woman on a folding chair on the street, she has already been taken from under the rubble day one. Where her right arm was trapped, there is a gaping wound that would need stitches. Bandwidth drum included. The team leader puts on an emergency bandage and gives her a few pills of paracetamol. The woman, the men next to her, thank the orange helmets with their hands on their hearts.
Counting only the dead makes saving lives impossible, is what Orange helmets makes clear. Doing something is better than nothing.
109 hours after the earthquake, a boy is heard under a concrete slab. “Ibrahim,” says the neighbor, peering through the steel pipes of the wickerwork. Ibrahim cries and screams, and that, says the commander, is a good sign. His men drill and break. He will probably call Tim, the surgeon, if he wants to come for a possible amputation of the arm. He turns out not to be necessary. The boy is gently pulled out of the opening, wrapped in foil, placed on a stretcher. Bystanders cheer and cry. A child has just been born again, it seems. A living has been saved.