Quake Team Shares Lessons of Armenia

Two Orange County firefighters who returned recently from a rescue mission to the city of Leninakan in Soviet Armenia said the devastating earthquake that struck there holds a lesson for Southern California.

“The same devastation could still happen here,” said Larry Greene, division chief with the Fullerton Fire Department who led an eight-man team of specialists in emergency medical aid and heavy rescue work to Soviet Armenia.

“We have many unreinforced buildings here from the pre-1930s seismic (building) code,” Greene said at a news conference Wednesday in Fullerton. “We are going to see devastation as they did in Armenia.”

Experts laid much of the blame for the Armenian quake’s heavy death toll of more than 50,000 to shoddy construction methods, the widespread use of unreinforced masonry and disorganization during initial rescue efforts.

Greene said that if a 6.9 earthquake similar to the one that violently shook Armenia had hit Whittier last year, that town probably would have been leveled. The Whittier quake measured 5.9 on the Richter scale.

“The Whittier quake was a nice slap on the hand asking: Are we prepared?” said Mike McGroarty, a battalion chief with the La Habra Fire Department who worked alongside Greene for the team’s 2 1/2-day stay in Leninakan.

“There’s a lot more that we can work on,” he said. “We are a tad more prepared than what they were over there.”

But McGroarty added that initial response after a disaster such as the Whittier quake “could possibly be as disorganized” as early relief and rescue efforts were in Soviet Armenia.

Greene, 42, of Canyon Lake and McGroarty, 39, of La Habra, were the only team members selected from the West Coast. The trip was sponsored by the People to People Citizen Ambassador Program of Spokane, Wash., a private organization, and the International Assn. of Fire Chiefs in Washington, D.C.

Greene is a 20-year firefighting veteran and an emergency medical specialist. McGroarty is a 12-year veteran of the Fire Department and a heavy-rescue expert.

Fullerton Fire Chief Ron Coleman, president of the fire chiefs’ international association, emphasized the lessons of preparedness that the team brought back from the Soviet disaster.

Coleman called for a national data bank to coordinate emergency response teams in this country and worldwide. “We can’t really afford not to,” he said. “Really, there is nothing being done on a national or international basis.”

And fire and police crews cannot work such disasters alone, Coleman said. Cities must be prepared to handle a crisis by themselves for the first 3 days, with city planners, businesses and local organizations all playing a role.

In California, which is crisscrossed by earthquake fault lines, people cannot allow themselves to be lulled by vague predictions of a massive shaker that may strike sometime in the distant future, Greene added.

“We do need to prepare our people because it’s only a matter of when our earthquake will happen,” he warned.

10 Days After Quake

Greene, McGroarty and the team of U.S. and Canadian rescue and emergency specialists flew into Soviet Armenia on Dec. 16, 10 days after the earthquake hit.

Their planned 2-week stay was cut short because of below-zero temperatures and food-supply problems, Greene said. The team carried no special rescue equipment, only food and supplies for their own needs, he said.

At one point, Green said hat more than 110 airplanes were backed up along the Tarmac of Yerevan Airport, where international relief workers and supplies streamed in to Armenia. The jam of aircraft looked worse than cars bunched in rush-hour traffic on Orange County freeways, he said.

Then it took more than 5 hours for their bus to navigate the 65 miles from the airport into Leninakan, Armenia’s second-largest city with 290,000 inhabitants, Greene said.

Along the icy, mountain road, were scattered the wrecks of emergency vehicles that had slid into ditches in their rush. Once in town, Greene said, they saw an apocalyptic scene of death and destruction.

Scene ‘Overwhelming

“It was overwhelming,” he said.

Coffins were piled on street corners. The living carried the dead on their shoulders. Windowless concrete towers leaned uneasily over streets filled with rubble. But mostly, the buildings were reduced to piles of rubble, now just small pieces of prefabricated concrete no larger than 8 inches, McGroarty said.

“Pancake collapse, we call it,” he added.

Leninakan was more than 80% destroyed by the two tremors that shook the city within minutes on a Tuesday morning, according to official Soviet accounts.

Greene said the team was too late for rescue efforts. When they arrived, it was time to look for bodies.

The first 24 hours are critical in saving lives, McGroarty said. “It’s the golden 24 hours when you’re going to make the biggest percentage of rescues” because the people trapped in the top layers of debris are usually the only ones who can be saved, he explained.

During the team members’ stay, they heard of only 20 people actually pulled alive from the rubble after the initial shock waves hit Leninakan, McGroarty said.

And high-tech gadgets such as infra-red detectors, heat-seeking cameras and listening devices may be of little use in a disaster, he said, explaining that background noise from heavy rescue equipment overwhelms the listening tools. And in Armenia, the buildings collapsed into such small pieces that rescuers could rarely insert devices into empty spaces where survivors might be huddled, he said.

Dogs Lose Sense of Smell

Search dogs also lose their sense of smell in the dust. Trained to track down live people, the animals become “stressed and confused after smelling dead bodies,” Greene recounted.

The team pitched its three blue tents in a schoolyard about 150 yards from the collapsed, 9-story apartment house, which rescuers dug into with hands and shovels, Greene said.

The team itself had to sweep snow off the tents to prevent them from collapsing, he said.

There were many scenes of horror and grief.

Each morning on the way to work, the team passed a stack of coffins, McGroarty said.

At the pile of debris where they worked--once a building that had crumbled into a 20-foot-high mound--a woman walked the rubble every day from dawn into the night searching for her family, Greene said.

His team pulled 11 bodies from the ruins, mostly those of children, he said.

They found a family of four, and it appeared that the mother had died only hours before their shovels broke through, Greene said.

“It’s a helpless feeling,” he observed. “There are still many thousands buried.”