Dispatch a ‘Quake Country’ Team

Urban search and rescue teams in California--including Los Angeles, Orange and San Francisco counties--are surely well qualified to deal with earthquake disasters. Instead, it was a team from Fairfax, Va., that the U.S. government sent off Tuesday to Taipei, as it had earlier to Turkey.

That’s because the federal agency that provides quick-response help for disasters abroad, the Agency for International Development’s office of foreign disaster assistance, contracts only with search and rescue units in Fairfax and Miami-Dade County, Fla. Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Mission Hills) has offered an amendment to a foreign operations appropriations bill that would add West Coast teams to the mix, especially for disasters in Asia, but it’s moving very slowly through Congress.

The Taipei quake sharply points up the benefits of having overseas-response search and rescue teams on the West Coast. A group from Los Angeles or San Francisco could be in many parts of Asia hours sooner than their East Coast equivalents and would have both experience and solid training in quake rescue. Experience in a situation like Taipei’s is also, frankly, the best on-the-job training that a rescue squad could hope to obtain.

A spokesman for AID said the agency is investigating whether it can, if there are no diplomatic clearance problems or other legal impediments, send teams from the West Coast. But the L.A. city and county teams, their members in possession of passports and chafing at the bit, shouldn’t hold their breath. And, of course, it will soon be too late.

Taipei needs the help. California search and rescue teams need the experience. Somehow Washington can’t put one and one together.