Urgent, high-stakes decisions based on partial information are unavoidable in emergency response. See how decisions like that played out for British responders to an Iranian earthquake.

By Divisional Officer Peter Crook
Hampshire (U.K.) Fire & Rescue Service
Preparing for the next Bam

In the early morning of Dec. 26, 2003, an earthquake measuring between 6.2 and 6.6 on the Richter scale and with its epicentre directly beneath the Iranian city of Bam caused awful devastation and prompted a huge international response.

As part of this response, the U.K. government sent personnel from the U.K. Fire Service Search and Rescue Team to help locate and rescue any severely trapped casualties. I was mobilised as leader of the crews from the Hampshire Fire & Rescue Service and also assigned the role of the mission's fire service operations commander.

As commanders, we all train, use procedures and systems, and build up experience so that difficult decisions become easier and fewer. The problems thrown up by something as unusual as this can provide a lot of decision-making challenges in a very concentrated time. I will try to honestly relate some details of the deployment as a series of decision making "high (and low) lights" in an attempt to share this experience.

Will we go?
The U.K. Department for International Development, our equivalent to the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, monitors various events around the world. They do this for all sorts of reasons, but one of their responsibilities is to send us&r teams on behalf of the U.K. government to help at major disasters. They rely on diplomatic contacts in the country concerned, and as with most of us, they often get a lot of information via the media.

Once an event is identified, they then seek a political decision from the U.K. government on whether to offer help. This will depend on many factors, some obvious like the scale of the disaster, its location, whether it's in a war zone, etc. But there are also political reasons why the United Kingdom would want to send aid to certain countries. In the case of Iran, it was a country which had been "out of bounds" for some time, so the government was very keen to send people.

We got an initial standby message quite early on Dec. 26, when the scale of the disaster was still not clear. An official offer of help was made to Iran during these early stages, but assessments were still being made, so nothing happened at that time.

At this point there are often problems, as governments are struggling themselves and can be overwhelmed by the disaster. They may not realize the scale of the event and its implications and possibly think they can cope with their own resources. Many mobilisations are frustratingly stalled at this stage.

We cannot mobilise until invited by the host country. For example, if the Fairfax (Va.) US&R Task Force were to land in Iran in several military aircraft without permission, could that be considered an invasion?

The media coverage and the information coming from dfid, however, indicated that help would be needed and if at all possible, we would go once an invite was received. I informed the Hampshire team and made sure they were ready to move quickly. Mobilisation involves lots of vehicles, equipment and people coming together, a major inconvenience if we don’t go, especially on the day after Christmas!

I would normally have waited for the official call to mobilise, but the knowledge that we had some complex, untested mobilisation arrangements led me to pre-empt the confirmation and get everything started. When confirmation came, we were given only four hours to be on the plane, so if we hadn't pre-mobilised, we may not have achieved that.

How to get there?
The mobilisation message goes out to the various groups that will make up the total team, after which they descend on the chosen airport with their people and equipment.

While this is going on, dfid has an "air broker" who locates a suitable aircraft. We have in the past flown with the military, but experience has shown that this cannot be guaranteed, and there can also be problems getting into some countries if military transport is used. It’s usually quicker and cheaper to charter a civilian aircraft.

The disadvantages are that the amount of equipment can be restricted, loading and unloading can be difficult, and vehicles cannot be taken. So far this has not been a major issue, however. Commercial aircraft can take prodigious amounts of equipment, as long as it’s packaged to fit into the hold.

Our air broker had air containers ready in a warehouse at Stansted Airport near London, where we could drive our vehicles in and unload our equipment straight into the containers. Manifests were then collated, paperwork done and the containers were loaded onto the plane.

For the Bam deployment, we flew a team of 72 personnel direct to Kerman airport, about 125 miles north of Bam. We landed at Kerman, and almost immediately 22 of our team were able to squeeze onto an Iranian c-130 and fly directly to Bam. They were among the very first rescue teams on the ground, about 28 hours after the quake hit.

However, the main contingent was left at the airport waiting for another aircraft, without knowing how long it might be. (Under U.N. guidelines, local transportation should be provided by the host country and this has always worked, although with varying degrees of success.) Because we were one of the first foreign teams to arrive, dfid set up a U.N. reception centre at the airport to help coordinate onward transport. They identified three buses that may have been able to get us to Bam, although there were reports of the road being damaged by the quake.

The command team debated the option and eventually decided to wait for the promised aircraft. Five hours later, we were still waiting when a truck and two coaches were offered. By then we just wanted to move, so we decided to drive to Bam, and four hours later we were 5 miles from Bam and seeing lightly damaged buildings.

The heavy traffic then came to a grinding halt, with thousands of vehicles spreading out into the desert trying to get into and out of Bam on one small road, with the result that it resembled the road to Basra at the end of the Gulf War. It took a further very frustrating 11 hours to get to our base camp, where we found that other teams had leapfrogged us by flying down. There was definitely a bad decision in there somewhere amongst (or because of) the changes of mind.

A crowded base camp
We were put into a very large army compound and found a grassy corner to set up camp just off the huge empty parade ground. The spot was also near an electrical substation, which we were eventually able to tap into for power.

At this stage, there were probably only three or four teams there. Over the next 48 hours, however, the total rose to 34 foreign teams of various sizes totalling about 1,500 personnel. Every corner of the world was represented, although geography meant that Asian and European countries were first there.

Eventually, the whole parade ground was crowded, and the main problem became managing all these teams effectively, a task that was never really achieved. I represented the United Kingdom at the team leaders meetings and counted over 80 people at one of them. The management of this number of people is a serious challenge, especially for the local emergency management agency, who are supposed to provide transport, interpreters and guides for each team.

Who should be deployed?
For safety and logistics reasons, sufficient personnel were kept back at base to set up the camp properly and provide command support and an emergency team. Everyone wants to get "on the pile," so each brigade crew left one person behind.

Experience can be vital in extreme situations, but I wanted to give the Hampshire personnel who had never worked at a major quake the most exposure, so I chose to keep back the two most experienced personnel and sent a relatively inexperienced team out. This sounds dangerous, but I was happy they were very well trained and more importantly, the situation was unusually safe.

Virtually all the affected buildings had completely collapsed and crumbled, leaving no voids where casualties could have survived. This meant there was very little likelihood of needing to commit personnel into extended debris removal, tunnelling or other highly dangerous operations. It also meant the experienced people were available for unexpected events, which turned out to be exactly what happened.

Whom to help?
A perennial dilemma at this type of disaster is how to prevent our very limited time being used to recover bodies. We have a clear protocol to leave the dead in order to give any living casualties the best chance.

Most cultures, however, some more than others, are desperate to recover their loved ones' bodies, either to bury them according to the rules of their religion or simply to confirm their deaths and be reassured they aren’t suffering.

Our role nonetheless is to locate and rescue any severely trapped live casualties, and every hour reduces the chance of finding survivors. We often have to refuse to dig out bodies in order to spend our time searching for potentially live casualties. It can be difficult to refuse a man who is begging for help to dig out his entire dead family.

This pressure has occasionally led us to commit personnel to dangerous tasks or to spend valuable time at a known body recovery. We did have people in Bam making this type of impassioned request, but they always seemed to understand our need to move on, which made these decisions easier than they might have been.

A dead friend or a live stranger?
A bizarre twist for me was the discovery that the only British citizen to die in the earthquake was a former Hampshire firefighter, Gavin Sexton, whom I had worked with and knew reasonably well. We discovered this during the first full day’s searching, when all the teams were out working in their allocated sectors.

Gavin had been fulfilling a lifelong dream to travel the world, meeting and living with local people. He had resigned from Hampshire Fire & Rescue to do this and was about 18 months into his trip. He had been doing the Asian/European leg solo on a motorcycle and had stopped in Bam, having had been lucky to get an Iranian visa.

It emerged that his body had been located in the ruins of a guest house, but would be buried locally if we didn’t retrieve it quickly. I decided to take some spare personnel from base camp to try to retrieve Gavin's body. This meant a skeleton crew being left at base camp, so weakening our already limited resilience in an emergency. I also had to hand over my responsibility for operational command to someone else. Both were decisions that could be criticised.

We were then delayed waiting for British Embassy officials to decide if it was likely that we could repatriate Gavin’s body. We should have just left immediately and worried about the red tape later. On our way to Gavin’s address, we were waved down by a Red Crescent official with a report of a live casualty. We stopped to help, which was an easy decision, although it turned out to be another false alarm. We subsequently missed recovering Gavin’s body by 15 minutes. Most bodies in Bam were buried in mass graves, so Gavin's exact location will probably never be known.

We returned to the guest house site the following day and were able to recover Gavin's rucksack, which had his personal papers, camera, photos, and various gifts and mementoes. These were given to his family on New Year’s Eve, the day we returned to Hampshire.

When to leave?
We usually continue search operations for about five days in the knowledge that some people can survive in the right circumstances. We search for concealed voids amongst and inside the rubble where people may be entombed, but can survive for days. The decision on when to stop searching is always difficult, not least because team members are keen to keep working even when the chance of live rescues seems impossible.

But the emphasis on search and rescue has to change at some time so resources can be concentrated on removing bodies (often by bulldozing buildings) to reduce health hazards and also to care for the survivors. It's a hideous thought that someone may survive for days only to die when a bulldozer demolishes what is left of the building, though this has undoubtedly happened at some disasters. However, someone has to make this decision in the best interests of the survivors so disease doesn’t kill many more.

Bam was unusual because the construction methods and materials caused the buildings to crumble into very small pieces. Most buildings were made using traditional mud brickwork and brittle mortar that simply crumbled on top of people and left no voids. We looked for larger structures where concrete slab or similar construction may have left survivable voids, but there were no such buildings.

All the international US&R teams attended a U.N. debriefing after the first full day’s searching, at which we all reported no live casualties found. More significantly, no-one expected to find any. For this to come from the very people who were desperate to work in the smallest hope of finding anyone alive shows the degree of devastation we were encountering.

The United Nations announced their intention to reduce the search and rescue phase and prioritise the recovery phase as soon as possible. The U.K. command team then discussed when exactly we should withdraw. What is usually a difficult decision with varied opinions turned out to be unanimous. We actually carried on search operations through that night and all the next day in different areas, still with no hint of live casualties. The only second thought we had was the help we could have offered to people who just wanted willing labour to uncover and remove bodies.

After our return, there were reports of two miraculous discoveries of survivors, which of course prompts you to rethink your decisions and consider what you might have done with hindsight. As a team member, I always wanted to stay longer and do more. As a commander, having to consider wider issues, I have to balance this natural enthusiasm against all the other factors involved.

In this case, the decision to move out early allowed resources to be targeted at helping the survivors and preventing disease. I still don’t think we would have rescued any more people than actually happened. In fact, as we left we handed over our campsite to the Save The Children charity, who were starting to bring in aid aimed at helping the orphaned children. We left all our self-heating meals, water, lighting and a generator to help speed up their response. Did this help more people than we could have?

The final death toll in Bam will never be known exactly. The highest figure talks of 40,000 deaths, while others quote 25,000. Either would normally be incomprehensible even when you see the devastation. The numbers had much more reality for me this time for two reasons: I witnessed the bulldozers, the trenches and the bodies being “processed” at the cemetery, and someone I knew, Gavin Sexton, had died there.

We learn a tremendous amount from each deployment, but it's difficult for people to discuss less-than-perfect decisions. Hopefully sharing these experiences and the issues involved will be of interest to others and may even help when an unusual and challenging decision presents itself.

About the author
Peter Crook has served for 25 years with the Hampshire (U.K.) Fire & Rescue Service, where he’s currently the divisional officer for civil protection and terrorist response. He has been involved in us&r since ukfssart was formed in 1991/2 and became Hampshire’s team coordinator several years ago. Crook has been mobilized to several disasters, including earthquakes in Turkey and Iran, and has trained in Fairfax County, Va.; Texas; New York State; Australia; and New Zealand.