Urban Search and Rescue

07/09/2010

On September 4th, 2010, at 4.35 am, Holmes engineer Des Bull, unlike most of Canterbury, was awakened by his wife. She was awakened by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. After checking on his kids, he returned to find his wife lying next to the bed. When he asked her why, she said "that's what you told me to do in the event of an earthquake."  He replied "well, that's the first time that you've ever done anything that I've told you to do".

Des had run through emergency procedures before - as a member of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR), he'd had to. After ensuring the safety of his family, his home and the local neighbours - he was on the road, a scant hour and a half after the earthquake.

His destination was Woolston, the local headquarters of USAR. Des, along with six Holmes engineers, are USAR-trained to assist the New Zealand Fire Service by ensuring safe entry into damaged buildings to aid the injured or those at risk from injury.

There were few injuries from the earthquake, but because so many buildings in Christchurch are older, masonry-type structures, the chimneys and gables suffered quite a bit of damage. This damage presented a danger to the public and to other structures. The USAR team in Christchurch worked tirelessly in the weeks following the earthquake to ensure public safety by shoring and restraining loose sections of masonry walls.

"It was the first time I'd been able to interact with the public in this way" said Des, "People were happy to see us, offering us coffee and so on. It was hard to imagine that some of these same people were in such difficult straits."

Internationally, USAR is based on a WWII British Civil Defence concept. It was adopted in the USA after the Armenian earthquake in 1989 and after the Northridge Earthquake in California in 1994, it was launched here.

That launch was aided by Des and his colleague Dave Brunsdon who have trained more than twenty-five rescue engineering specialists across New Zealand and in other countries.

NZ USAR is a national resource comprised of Fire, Police and Civil Defence units, along with structural engineers, doctors, other technicians and canine units. New Zealand has been and will be again reliant on these teams both in times of disaster, and in times of relative quiet.

The video (right) talks about some of the urgent work NZ USAR has performed in Christchurch and under difficult conditions. Thanks to TVNZ for the video, which can also be found here.