Hours after two huge earthquakes and hundreds of aftershocks struck southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6, some much-needed rescuers began to arrive in Turkey – K9 teams from around the world that had come to lend a hand to GEA, a Turkish volunteer rescue team.
K9, a homophone of canine, is a dog specially trained to assist security forces and emergency teams – in rescues, drug enforcement or other operations. These dogs came from, among other countries, El Salvador, Germany, Mexico, Qatar, South Korea, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States.
The much-needed rescuers, who can locate victims solely through scent, are needed to assist Turkish K9 teams in desperate operations where buildings as tall as 14 storeys have collapsed, making it difficult to locate survivors through sight or sound.
REDOG, a K9 volunteer team from Switzerland, is on the ground in the Turkish city of Iskenderun, working with the local GEA team, an all-volunteer search and rescue group.
Since arriving near midnight on February 6, the team of ten people and six trained dogs, along with GEA, have discovered 39 people alive under the rubble.
The dogs are trained to sniff out a human scent, stand there, and bark loudly to alert their handlers to the location. The findings are then confirmed by releasing a second dog.
If the two dogs confirm, this allows human rescuers to concentrate their digging efforts on that particular spot until they find the person.
“I think it’s one of the most emotional moments of my life … the moment when one of our dogs signals to us that he found some people in the rubble,” REDOG’s vice chief for rubble search Matthias Gerber told Al Jazeera.
The dogs work in groups of three at rubble sites all day, taking turns working 20-minute shifts followed by 40-minute breaks.
After their dogs signaled the location of where people were buried in one case, human rescuers began digging at the site and soon heard knocking coming from behind the rubble from the victims trapped inside, confirming what the dogs had already pinpointed.
Rescuers continue to pull out more survivors from the rubble in Turkey and Syria as the death toll from last week’s earthquakes topped 36,000.
The quakes have killed at least 31,643 people in Turkey as of Monday (13th February,2023) and 4,614 people in Syria.
Source: Aljazeera News