This has been a truly horrible two weeks. Like a lot of people, I’m still reeling from the shock of what happened, and is still happening, in Sichuan. This is the third time this year that I’ve found myself looking out the window in Beijing at complete normality, while not far away people’s lives have been turned upside down.
Compared with the overwhelming enormity of the events since May 12, the issue of whether foreign rescue teams seemed irrelevant to me, so I dismissed it as a waste of time. But it has been brought up to some extent in the media and it did generate a bit of argument in China. Some of that argument I can respect - the practical issue of whether foreign rescue teams would really save more lives. Some of it I can’t respect - paranoid claims by some that the foreigners might be spies.
One of the reasons I dismissed the issue was this article by Nick Cater, written after the Bam earthquake in 2003:
The British search and rescue teams arriving back from Iran have successfully proved that flying in people and dogs to scour the rubble and mud of foreign disaster zones for survivors with hi-tech gear or their bare hands is in almost all cases a waste of time, effort and money.
Information from the main charities involved suggests that the 68 search and rescue experts from five different UK groups and their four trained dogs failed to find a single person alive in Bam. The story was much the same in other recent disasters, such as the earthquakes in Algeria, Turkey and India, after which few people have been found alive by British teams.
This is hardly surprising. While the experts talk of the “golden hours” - usually just the first 24 - in which those trapped can expect to be found alive, it is local people who recover the vast majority of survivors, often based on knowing exactly where their families and friends were when the disaster struck.
If local people need help, it is from staff and trained volunteers who speak their language, know the area, require little or no external support and are integrated into the disaster preparedness and response systems of national and local government, specialised agencies and their country’s Red Cross or Red Crescent society.
International search and rescue teams today descend upon every sudden catastrophe from all over the world. Bam had around 34 groups from 28 countries. They even arrive without invitation or local partners, and their needs in terms of food, water, shelter, translators, transport and information put further strain on resources that are already scarce.
No doubt the British teams from Rapid UK, the International Rescue Corps, Canis, Bird and the fire services of Kent, Hampshire and Essex were better prepared than most and so totally self-sufficient that they could start work immediately and not be a burden on those they came to help.
But it was pointless for the Department for International Development under Hilary Benn to fly them to Iran when they could not arrive until well past those vital 24 hours, and more so when knowledge of the local construction techniques made it clear that few could have survived trapped. Earthquake-experienced Iran had it all under control.
Of course, Iran is happy to receive aid in terms of equipment, supplies and money, but early in the crisis its health minister, Ahmed Pezeshkian, was quoted - and presumably ignored - as saying that foreign volunteers were not really needed since large numbers of Iranians were already coming from all over the country.
It appears that in everything but ill-enforced building standards, the Iranians have done a superb job, mobilising many thousands of helpers, recovering tens of thousands of bodies and, within the limits of any crisis, efficiently organising evacuation of the injured and burial of the dead. Could any comparable British town have done as well?
The international volunteers are interviewed on TV after every natural disaster. Are these dogged - and doggy - heroes of search and rescue perhaps taking over from nurses in white as that popular, patronising media cliché, the angel of mercy? Or is it just that improved communications and transport have put more disasters within reach of the over-enthusiastic?
Either way, the best response to disaster is not to head for the airport, but to support local preparedness efforts with hard cash, and to consider how to help the recovery operation that will still be under way long after all those rescue dogs are released from quarantine.
AP put out one of the few articles in English devoted solely to China’s initial rejection of foreign rescue teams:
A team of British rescue specialists were rebuffed in their attempt to go to China to help hunt for earthquake survivors, a spokeswoman for the group said Sunday.
International Rescue Corps spokeswoman Julie Ryan said 10 volunteers flew to Hong Kong in the hope of joining the rescue effort. But the Chinese government denied them visas, saying it did not have the resources to manage their work.
[…]
“We have 27 years of earthquake rescue under our belt,” Ryan said. “We felt we could offer something quite unique to the Chinese government.” ….
Nick Cater’s article in 2003 convinced me enough that I didn’t really think very much more about the issue. But this earthquake in Sichuan was the first time such a catastrophe has happened in the country where I live. So it’s the first earthquake that has made me want to find out if things are true or not true.
How many people could the International Rescue Corps have saved if it had been allowed into China? The IRC’s website lists 13 earthquakes it has responded to. Unlike most search and rescue teams, it also provides mission reports for six of them. Here’s the number of people actually saved:
(1995) Japan: 0
(1999) Turkey: 1
(2001) India: 2
(2003) Algeria: 0
(2003) Iran: 0
(2005) Pakistan: 3
It’s not so easy to find the records of other international SAR teams because most don’t make their success rate so public. Since the IRC’s best result was in Pakistan, I tried to find out how many people other foreign teams saved there. The British government says the total number was 24, in a footnote here:
UK Search and Rescue teams - 84 experts with 4 dogs – who rescued 13 of the total 24 survivors pulled from the rubble;
A dozen or so countries sent search and rescue teams to Pakistan, but virtually none of them seem to have actually found anyone. The Turkish teams saved nine. The Chinese saved three. That means the British government was wrong by at least one person. At least 25 people were saved by foreign rescue teams. I tried to find more, but I gave up.
How does that compare with the number of people saved by locals? I can’t put a figure to that. But according to the South China Morning Post (subscription) by last Wednesday, 6,375 people had been saved in China. By the time foreign teams arrived in Sichuan, there was virtually no chance of finding more than a handful of survivors. The Russians found one. If foreign teams had been allowed in sooner, they would have found more, but the number would still have been tiny.
In angry debates I’ve read in Chinese forums, people have countered this argument by saying “If you could ask the people who are buried under the rubble, what do you think they’d want?” I can’t answer that, and suddenly this whole numbers thing seems utterly heartless. A life is a life. Twenty lives are twenty lives. The three children that the International Rescue Corps saved in Pakistan are alive, not dead.
But… The International Rescue Corps says it spent 30,000 pounds sterling getting to Hong Kong. How many lives could have been saved if that money had been spent differently? I don’t know. One single building in Sichuan built to higher standards would have saved more lives than several hundred foreign search and rescue workers.
