6 From Southland to Join U.S. Efforts in Sri Lanka

As a search and rescue expert and former soldier, Los Angeles County firefighter Tim O’Neill said he’d seen his share of human suffering.

But even as the 55-year-old Seal Beach resident was getting ready to board a plane for South Asia on Friday, O’Neill wondered just how much those experiences had prepared him for what would be the biggest emergency call in his life.

A member of California Task Force 2, a specially trained arm of the county Fire Department, O’Neill is part of a contingent of U.S. advisors and assessment experts descending on lands devastated Sunday by the Indian Ocean tsunami.

“I survived the Vietnam War and I’ve seen a lot of death and destruction as a firefighter, but this is going to be difficult,” O’Neill said. “The scale of this is just so much larger.”

Six members of the task force -- O’Neill, three other county firefighters, an emergency room physician and a structural engineer -- will help assess damage and offer advice in Sri Lanka, where more than 28,000 people are believed to have died and nearly a million have been left homeless.

On Thursday, the six men loaded piles of backpacks and boxes of water and rations onto trolleys at Los Angeles International Airport amid a swarm of media and curious onlookers. The attention was a bit bewildering to O’Neill and the rest of his crew, who were flying to Washington for a mission briefing.

“We’re just six guys,” O’Neill said. “We’re talking about thousands and thousands of people dead.”

The task force, which has 186 members, is working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. The office also works with Virginia’s Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, which will be sending half a dozen experts to Indonesia. The California team will be based in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, for about two weeks.

The leader of the six-member California team, Battalion Chief Jim Powers, 52, of Thousand Oaks, said his task force was most often called on to train foreign emergency personnel in urban search and rescue techniques, particularly for dealing with earthquakes. Powers, who has directed task force operations in Central America, Brazil, Turkey and Jordan, said it was unclear what the team would be called on to do in Sri Lanka, but the members were willing to take on any task.

“We could be out in the field doing assessments, or they might ask us to drive trucks and hand out rice and water.”

The two other county firefighters on the team are Dennis Cross, 38, of Laguna Hills and John Crain, 54, of Lake Arrowhead.

One of the crew’s civilian members is structural engineer Bruce Cook, a 52-year-old Hermosa Beach resident who advises rescuers on the safety of buildings and how best to conduct rescues in them. Cook said that he volunteered for the task force after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and that this was his first foreign deployment.

The team’s other civilian is emergency room physician Steve Chin, 43, of Huntington Beach. Chin, a doctor at the Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier, is a veteran of task force missions; he provided assistance after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Chin advised his fellow team members to brace themselves for strong emotional responses to what they would see.

“You’re going to have normal reactions to extremely abnormal things,” Chin said. “To this day, whenever I smell wet cement, I have flashbacks to the basement of the Alfred Murrah building,” the federal building in Oklahoma City that was bombed.

Among the concerns team members had was how they would be perceived in Sri Lanka, and whether the American flags on their uniforms might cause them problems.

Sri Lanka’s fragile cease-fire with Tamil Tiger rebels also might be an issue. The rebels have been waging a two-decade civil war for autonomy in the island’s north and east, and the borders of these regions are heavily mined.

Team members met Friday with USAID officials and the Fairfax County response team before leaving Washington in the evening for Sri Lanka.

The Washington stop was the first time the group had a chance to sit down together and discuss its mission. After checking into their hotel, the men gathered in a hotel banquet room festooned with New Year’s decorations and a buffet table fountain. They chuckled at the party preparations. In their rush to prepare for their mission, the holiday had slipped their minds.

“I totally forgot New Year’s,” O’Neill said.