O.C. Disaster-Aid Team Flies to Oklahoma City to Help With Grim Job : Bombing: 62-member squad includes firefighters, engineers, doctors, law enforcement officers, dogs and handlers. They’re prepared for the worst.
A 62-member search-and-rescue team from Orange County flew to Oklahoma City on Saturday night to help with the dangerous and often grim work of digging out the ravaged Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
The special unit, one of eight similar disaster-aid teams in the state, is made up of veteran firefighters, civil and structural engineers, doctors and law enforcement officers as well as specially trained dogs and their handlers. Many members of the team have been tested before in the Northridge and Loma Prieta earthquakes.
Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Rob Patterson said his team has been anxious to go since the April 19 bombing. They have been told to prepare for the worst.
The team will be working in a windy and cold climate and amid the piled rubble of the first floor and basement of the building, a devastated area the disaster workers have come to call “the pit,†Patterson said.
“From everything we have heard, this is like nothing any of us have ever seen before in terms of the carnage and the physical work,†said Patterson, 37, of San Juan Capistrano who usually works out of Fire Station No. 24 in Mission Viejo.
“We will all be maxed out, physically and mentally,†said Patterson in a telephone interview during a brief stop in the journey Saturday. “Most firefighters deal with death and carnage almost daily, but nothing on this scale.â€
The team will work with the other hundreds of rescue workers who toil around the clock at the bombed-out federal building “on our hands and knees, moving things bit by bit,†Patterson said. The team carries special equipment such as search cameras and dogs.
Unfortunately, it may be too late to use their rescue training, Patterson said.
“If we can somehow find someone alive, by some miracle, that would be great. If not, we can locate some victims to allow their loved ones to have some sort of closure to this tragedy,†Patterson said.
Vital members of the team are structural engineers like Johns Hopkins University-trained Solveig Thorvald, who is responsible for making sure the rescuers in the nine-story building are safe.
“We are there to ask, ‘Is the area safe?’ If not, ‘Why not and how can we fix the hazards?’ †said Thorvald, 33, of an Irvine resident and native of Iceland who joined the group about a year ago.
Like the others, Thorvald has experience with earthquake rescues, but never anything like the destruction at the Murrah Building. “This is a whole new area for us to be working in. Hopefully this will be our first and last experience like this,†she said.
Dr. Audrey Konow, an internist and emergency room physician from Yorba Linda, is a key team member charged with caring for the health of her fellow rescue workers first. Konow, a three-year member of the team, worked at the 1994 Northridge earthquake, but “nothing as catastrophic as this.â€
“I think this situation is unique, in terms of its problems,†said Konow, 47, the mother of two sons. “This is a search effort, rather than a rescue effort at this point. But this is a very, very dangerous situation these people are working in.â€
Like the rest of the team members, Konow found out early Saturday that they would be leaving later that night.
“I had to miss my son’s baseball game this morning and a hockey game this afternoon, but it’s amazing how my neighbors and friends come in and help out,†she said.
The team, which replaced another special unit from Los Angeles County on Saturday, is prepared to stay in Oklahoma City up to 10 days.
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