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At 9 p.m. Sunday night in California, the call went out to Los Angeles County Fire Department Urban Search and Rescue members to see who was available for immediate deployment after the devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Turkey.
Some 77 members — firefighters, structural engineers, paramedics, doctors, technical experts and six K9 team dogs — assembled at the headquarters in Pacoima. Just before midnight they were wheels-up, winging their way to Turkey as part of a sprawling, 141,000-strong search-and-rescue effort that has drawn teams from around the world even as the death toll Saturday topped 28,000 in the region; potentially thousands more remain unaccounted for under the rubble.
In the days since the earthquake, those teams, along with countless local volunteers, medical professionals, rescue personnel and miners, have become a ubiquitous presence in virtually every street of Turkey’s ravaged southern provinces, working 24-hour shifts to locate and extricate survivors or bring out the dead.
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