By Jennifer Price
It took the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue team 30 hours to free a 29-year-old woman trapped under concrete slabs inside a collapsed building at the University of Port-au-Prince after last month’s devastating earthquake.
The 115-person team, which included two George Washington physicians and a GW alumnus who is currently a graduate student, was the first U.S. rescue group to get to Haiti, arriving just 24 hours after the earthquake. For the first three days, they worked through the night searching for anyone buried alive.
“We trained for this, but the level of damage we saw was enormous. And there was no preparation for it. Building after building after building was collapsed,” says Scott Schermerhorn, B.S. ’07, a technician with Fairfax County Fire and Rescue and a member of the search and rescue team, who is pursuing his master’s degree in emergency services management at GW. “It was surreal.”
Of the 134 rescues made by international teams, 47 were made by U.S. teams, according to the United States Agency for International Development. The Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue team, which is made up of physicians, structural engineers and other emergency personnel, found 16 individuals.
Upon surveying a collapsed structure, the team first sends out canine specialists that are trained to react to the scent of living people. When the dogs react, the team sets up sensors around the pile of rubble that detect noise buried deep under the debris. If the sensors go off, small cameras are pushed into a crack to search for a visual image of the victim.
But even after locating an individual, it can take hours to make contact, let alone get the person to safety.
Anthony Macintyre and Bruno Petinaux, both physicians at George Washington’s Department of Emergency Medicine, were not able to physically touch the woman trapped inside the university building for the first 16 hours of the rescue.
“It was still another three hours before we could start a central IV in her,” says Dr. Macintyre, director of the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue team.
The 7.0-magnitude earthquake caused the university’s five-story building to be reduced to two.
“Patient care is critical. Even while we are removing debris around them, we are addressing issues of dehydration and crushed limbs and administering pain management,” says Dr. Petinaux. “You say you’re there to help them and that you won’t abandon them.”
This was not the first time that the GW doctors have been sent to a disaster area.
Dr. Macintyre, who has been at GW since 1996, was sent to Haiti in 2008 after a school collapsed killing 94 students and adults. He also responded to the Pentagon bombing on Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 in addition to earthquakes in Iran and Turkey and half a dozen hurricanes.
Dr. Petinaux, who came to GW in 2002, has responded to three different hurricanes, and as a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, has been deployed three times in the past seven years.
Mr. Schermerhorn, of McLean, Va., earned his bachelor’s degree from GW in 2007 in emergency medical services management. Because he was already working full time at Fairfax County Fire and Rescue, he took his courses online. A year later, he began his master’s degree, also at GW, and plans to work his way up in the fire department before working at the federal level for agencies like Federal Emergency Management Agency or USAID.
While the search and rescue team returned to the U.S. after 15 days, Dr. Macintyre says there’s still so much work to be done.
“Clearly there is more international assistance required,” says Dr. Macintyre. “It’s going to be different at this point than it was when we first arrived. A lot of the acute health and medical issues are probably beginning to wane, and the chronic ones are beginning to float to the service. Supporting and rebuilding the local health and medical infrastructure is going to be vital.”