National

Aides De Camp

In its hour of crisis, help comes from all quarters of the world

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Aides De Camp
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IT was one occasion no one complained about the foreign hand. International relief assistance to Gujarat came in the guise of volunteers in smart brightly-coloured outfits, sophisticated gadgets, pedigreed dogs and a lot of goodwill (from Pakistan included). Thirteen countries—Switzerland, Turkey, Japan, Israel, Germany, Russia, the Slovak Republic, Malaysia, the uae, Pakistan, South Korea, the UK and the US—rushed in teams of specially trained rescuers, doctors, engineers, nurses and disaster experts. The Red Cross too flew in its experts and rescuers from various countries.

Though most of these rescue teams lost valuable time in organising themselves in the absence of proper government coordination, news of lives saved by them kept trickling in. The final tally of their rescue efforts may not be impressive in the context of the sheer scale of devastation but their appearance alone was reassuring to relatives of people trapped in the rubble. The Swiss team was among the first to arrive. Doctors in the crack Israeli team were quick to set up an effective makeshift hospital in Bhuj. While all medical attention was on quake victims, this team also helped deliver a child. As a mark of gratitude, the girl has been christened Israela.

Most of these teams came with dogs trained to sniff out trapped survivors. They also brought sophisticated life-detecting equipment that transmitted sounds into broken buildings and also picked up the minutest sound from within. Initially, some teams found the progress difficult as there was no authority to guide them through the debris. Many lost their way while others were misled by locals who talked them into believing they had heard sounds from a building when all they wanted was their help to fish out their dead. Eventually some of the teams camped in Bhuj just went out with their dogs, scanned the entire town and figured out for themselves how many were alive and where. One common factor did help them: most people in the villages around Bhuj could speak and understand English.

Their obsession with being clinically methodical did put the British team behind schedule. In Bhuj, the British and Turkish teams didn't move out of their camps for a good many hours. When finally after all the meetings and briefings, the team did set out for the ruins, they were lost. A well-meaning rescue coordinator from Lincolnshire fire brigade rushed to a location in Bhuj and asked a local to draw a map on a piece of paper, with encouraging words like, "Oh that's a nice tip... oh that's a good landmark". Then they spent a lot of time trying to cordon off the area before moving in.

Though most of these teams intended to search and rescue, what they did more effectively was to provide relief. The Turkish team carried over a tonne of medicines. The British team carried some 2,000 litres of bottled water and anti-malaria tablets; the usaid team over 80 tonnes of relief material, including water purification units.

Before the foreign teams arrived, the only option injured victims had was to go to hastily-set-up local medical camps. With most of the hospitals having collapsed or rendered non-functional, the injured in many camps like in Anjar simply waited for whatever the doctors and interns could do. Even after 48 hours, these camps didn't have enough doctors or medical supplies. The army hospitals and camps, however, were more organised. Army personnel rescued ill survivors from the interior villages of Kutch and flew them out to various parts of the country for specialised treatment.

The armymen in fact were ubiquitous in their presence in affected areas before the foreign teams came. But there were stray incidents of the public ignoring them and greeting the foreign teams whole-heartedly. There were times in places like Bhuj when armymen sat around outside the debris awaiting further orders, while Turkish and British teams moved in and went about their jobs. Army personnel confessed they were not trained for such an operation. Sadly, despite little training, experience or state-of-the-art equipment, they remain the 'first reaction' fallback for our state governments during such crises. And so it was sound detectors versus shovels all along.

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