More Effort Needed on New Rescue Equipment

In an extraordinarily cruel twist of fate, when the Sylmar earthquake struck Feb. 9, 1971, one of the structures that sustained the worst damage housed the cardiac-care patients at the Veterans Hospital. Dozens of heart patients were trapped inside when the building collapsed.

As a reporter for The Times, I was one of the first outsiders to reach the scene, and I watched as one victim after another was pulled from the rubble. In a surreal scene, the patients were carried from the piles of concrete and twisted steel and placed on the lawn beneath towering palm trees, where some of them died.

Many others were trapped inside, and the tragedy continued to unfold over the following three days.

Some victims, no doubt, could have been saved if rescuers had known exactly where to look. But at the time, there was no high-tech device that could help.

More than 20 years later--when you can buy a powerful personal computer for less than $1,000 and traveling into space seems almost routine--such a device still isn’t available.

The real tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

“We’ve got all kinds of high-tech rescue equipment” to help pull people from collapsed buildings, said Mark Ghilarducci, deputy chief of fire and rescue operations for the California Office of Emergency Services. But what he doesn’t have, he said, is a device that will tell his rescue teams exactly where the victims are located.

Given the phenomenal advancements in technology over the last few years, development of such a device doesn’t seem like too much of a challenge. And indeed, some progress has been made.

Kun-Mu Chen, an electrical engineering professor at Michigan State University, has spent the last five years developing a microwave device that sends a beam of electromagnetic energy that bounces back from the rubble and the subject. His device can detect one of his students hiding in a void beneath 10 feet of rubble.

Even the slight movement of a heartbeat is enough to modulate the frequency of the wave echoing back from the student, Chen said. Although rubble also reflects back the signal, the frequency is not modulated, because the rubble is not moving.

“I can differentiate these two types of signals, so I knock out the reflection from the rubble and receive the reflection coming back from the human being,” Chen said.

The signal, he added, tells him something else important: The victim is still alive. And as grim as it may seem, that kind of information is vital to rescuers who must try to rescue those who can be saved before they recover the bodies of those who have already been lost .

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Similar technology is also being developed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where scientists are working on a ground radar system that could determine which reflected signals are from humans and which are from rubble.

Ghilarducci said both systems seem to work well in a controlled environment. But the results are far less clear in an actual earthquake or in an explosion such as the one that leveled the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where Ghilarducci coordinated rescue efforts. Even a dripping water line or shifting rubble could cloud the data, he said.

“I think [the researchers] are on the right track, and the devices show great promise,” he said. “But the success potential is still limited.”

The problem is money. Both the Michigan and the Livermore devices are bulky and cost at least $15,000 each. And there is limited market potential to lure a major manufacturer into the arena.

But, as Ghilarducci noted, both have demonstrated their viability.

“With more research and development, these will definitely be devices we would want to use,” he said.

Still, that could be a long way away. In the meantime, rescuers are left with the one tool that so far has proved the most effective: dogs.

The state has about 40 dogs that have been trained to sniff for human smells emanating from twisted chunks of steel and concrete after an earthquake. But there are limitations. Because odors travel through cracks in the rubble, the scent picked up by a dog may not be that close to the actual location of the victim.

These days, it would seem reasonable to expect rescuers to have a reliable device that could peer through the rubble, isolating victims before it is too late. The fact that they don’t have it raises all sorts of questions about our sense of priorities.

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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at leedye@compuserve.com