Treading carefully among unstable rubble and wearing face masks against choking dust from pulverized concrete, Virginia Task Force 1 members in Turkey now find themselves in a familiar role: trying to find and tend to survivors in the midst of devastation.
The 84 members of Fairfax County’s urban search-and-rescue team – which goes by the name of USA 1 on foreign missions – deployed with an 80-person squad from Los Angeles County, Calif., to aid victims of the Feb. 6 earthquake and subsequent aftershocks in Turkey.
The teams, representing the U.S. Agency for International Development, arrived in Turkey Feb. 8 then traveled 12 hours by bus to the city of Adiyaman in the country’s southeastern section.
Road conditions “actually were pretty good,” but there was considerable traffic and damaged bridges necessitated some detours, said team member John Morrison, who does data work for the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department and also the Vienna Volunteer Fire Department’s chief.
Conditions in Adiyaman, however, are “pretty bad,” with some whole city blocks destroyed by the earthquakes, he said in an interview with the GazetteLeader.
“When you have apartment buildings collapsing on top of other apartment buildings, it’s pretty devastating,” Morrison said. “There’s widespread destruction throughout the city. It’s overwhelming, and this is just one city among many in this region that are in the same situation.”
Aftershocks are a major concern for the team, although at the time of the interview it hadn’t experienced any significant ones. Rubble piles from collapsed buildings are inherently unstable; working on them requires team members to exercise extreme caution.
Team members rely on structural engineers and heavy-rigging specialists to ensure safety at the rescue sites and lift weighty slabs of buildings to the side to permit rescues deeper within the structures.
The team has been trying to find work sites where it can work to rescue deeply entombed victims.
“By the time a lot of the international teams get here, the people who are lightly entrapped or near the top floors are typically already rescued,” Morrison said. “We’re looking to get to those void spaces underneath the collapsed large, rebar-concrete structures and get to those people while there’s still time.”
Rescue officials do not know how long people can survive under such conditions, but “more than a week is not necessarily abnormal,” he said. The group has assisted other countries’ teams with rescue efforts, but has yet to find any survivors on its own, he added.
“We’re still in rescue mode until the Turkish government tells us they no longer need our abilities, and then we can work on demobilizing and coming home,” Morrison said.
As the team’s public-information officer on this mission, Morrison has been tasked with coordinating and managing media and social media. This deployment is only the second time the team has had such a role, he said.
The team has benefited in Turkey from a functioning mobile-phone network, which has allowed for more effective real-time coordination, Morrison said.
On some previous missions, non-functioning cell-phone networks have forced the team to rely on slower satellite-based communications.
Vienna Volunteer Fire Department deputy chief Jeff Snow also is serving with the team in Turkey.
The group also includes three doctors, multiple paramedics and six dogs apiece from both participating teams. Team members so far have suffered only minor injuries, Morrison said.
The deployment to Turkey marks Morrison’s sixth international mission with the task force. Morrison’s first team mission was to Haiti after an earthquake in 2010. He most recently was in Haiti following a 2021 earthquake and two years before that went to the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian.
About 90 percent of Virginia Task Force 1’s members are paid or volunteer members of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department. After acquiring specialized skills, those personnel apply through a competitive process for the Urban Search and Rescue Program. The team recruits its doctors and engineers.
Morrison, whose deployment in Turkey may force him to miss a planned trip to Singapore for a search-and-rescue meeting, said he’s anxious to return home to his wife and son. But he takes pride in the task force’s work in Turkey.
“It’s an incredible honor to represent the American people in a foreign nation during a disaster,” Morrison said. “The resiliency displayed by the people of Turkey, and in other disasters, is almost overwhelming.”
