On the Dark Side

Recovery is the side of rescue we rarely talk about—or prepare for

There’s a dark side to the rescue business known as recovery. In major events, most of what you may face could very well be the recovery of deceased human beings and parts of bodies, or even the gruesome task of disentanglement and disarticulation of the dead.

My highest of highs have been miraculous rescues that challenged me and my colleagues, testing our skills, organization and ability to adapt, improvise and overcome. Those rare moments inspired me in ways others outside our world will never understand—and they certainly reinforced and galvanized my career choice.

But my lowest of lows have been failed attempts to save a life and the horrors associated with catastrophic losses, especially those that came at the hands of other human beings.

California Task Force 3 operating at the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The V-line in the middle of the picture leads up to three bodies being recovered. Personnel were lined up in a V to pass down debris covering the bodies. The author is at the top and slightly above the V-line as the Rescue Team Manager in charge of the operation.

Oklahoma City
My first experience with an event like that was the Oklahoma City (OKC) bombing in 1995. As a national Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Task Force, we arrived on day 3 of the event with the body count at just over 60 and no survivors found after the first 12 hours of the event.

As the death toll continued to rise daily, it became apparent that the hope we all carried with us would be challenged and tempered by the reality of what a bomb blast and secondary collapse does to survival models often established for earthquake events.

When it was all said and done, 168 people lost their lives, and more than 500 people were injured. Our daily reality consisted of uncovering bodies and finding parts of people—very different than the expectations of the families and friends of the victims, who often held up pictures of loved ones or signs thanking us and ironically calling us heroes.

When you work in a place that stinks of death, no one feels like a hero, and those pictures of people were often the farthest things from what we found. We came to truly appreciate the people of Oklahoma for their goodness and unbelievable kindness, but many of us left the incident with a burden and secret that would haunt us for years to come.

That burden, or baggage, consisted of being rescuers who essentially rescued no one. USAR wasn’t so much about rescue as it was about the dark task of human recovery.

We rose to that task and took pride in our ability give families back their loved ones, and we treated each deceased victim as if they were one of our own, but it was gruesome work, especially if they were entangled and needed to be disarticulated, a fancy word that essentially means cutting them apart to free them.

We were given psychological debriefing and counseling when we returned home, but each of us had to individually move past what we saw and what had to be done. Although we all supported each other, you need to find your own kind of peace when you operate in that kind of an environment and understand that part of your value was rescuing the spirits of a nation and proving that some good can prevail over evil.

World Trade Center
I’ve never felt more proud to be an American than rubbing shoulders with rescuers from all over the nation at the Murrah Building collapse. But it took me about 5 years to slowly accept and find that peace, just in time to be deployed to the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse after 9/11. As excited and honored as I was to be deployed, a part of me dreaded going back into what I knew would be that “valley of death.”

As I looked into the strong and often stoic faces of the New York City firefighters and police officers at the WTC collapse, their eyes often deceived them. I knew that look; it was part disbelief, sorrow, anguish and anger.

Another true lesson of mega disasters is that they can be very emotionally conflicting. The WTC surpassed the Murrah building in size, scope, complexity and body count, and unfortunately, rescuers were lost in the balance both during and after the event.

But similar to the Oklahoma City incident, it was primarily a human recovery event. No one could anticipate what that would eventually mean in terms of complexity, scope and impact. More time and effort should be placed on that type of preparedness rather than the hollow promises of interoperability.

A Final Word
As more and more agencies around the nation create or refine their USAR capability, we must not fool ourselves into believing that recovery isn’t the greater part of rescue, if not the darker part of what we will have to confront, both in operations and in our own minds.

Harold Schapelhouman is a 26-year veteran firefighter with the Menlo Park (Calif.) Fire Protection District. At the start of 2007, he became the first internally selected fire chief in 21 years for his organization. Previously, he was the division chief in charge of special operations, which includes all district specialized preparedness efforts, the local and state water rescue program, and the local, state and national Urban Search and Rescue Program (USAR).

Schapelhouman was the task force leader in charge of California Task Force 3, one of the eight California USAR teams and one of the 28 federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS/FEMA) teams.