It’s one year since devastating earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria. Inside Geneva talks to search and rescue teams who were there:
Filip Kirazov, from Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID) says: “Every member of SARAID is a volunteer. So no one gets paid for any of the work we do. Our sole aim is to minimize human suffering, due to the impact of natural or manmade disasters.”
And to local business leaders who had tried to prepare for such a disaster.
“We were expecting a big earthquake in Istanbul, and we were calculating the number of people that were going to lose their lives, and the number of economic losses. The role of businesses there was to be prepared before, and help the economic recovery afterwards,” says Erhan Arslan, Turkonfed (Turkisn Enterprise and Business Confederation).
Can humanitarian organisations and business work together to respond? The United Nations (UN) have an initiative that tries to do just that.
Florian Rhiza Nery, Connecting Business Initiative says: “We often times see the challenges that come from the differences, between the business community, the private sector, and humanitarian organisations, not just the UN.”
Can it work? Humanitarians and entrepreneurs don’t always think the same way…
“When I hear about private public partnerships, I always say about in terms of the private ‘what’s in it for them?’ And the question of a private company being totally neutral or altruistic, I still have my doubts,” concludes Daniel Warner, political analyst.
Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
It’s one year since devastating earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria. Inside Geneva talks to search and rescue teams who were there:
Filip Kirazov, from Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID) says: “Every member of SARAID is a volunteer. So no one gets paid for any of the work we do. Our sole aim is to minimize human suffering, due to the impact of natural or manmade disasters.”
And to local business leaders who had tried to prepare for such a disaster.
“We were expecting a big earthquake in Istanbul, and we were calculating the number of people that were going to lose their lives, and the number of economic losses. The role of businesses there was to be prepared before, and help the economic recovery afterwards,” says Erhan Arslan, Turkonfed (Turkisn Enterprise and Business Confederation).
Can humanitarian organisations and business work together to respond? The United Nations (UN) have an initiative that tries to do just that.
Florian Rhiza Nery, Connecting Business Initiative says: “We often times see the challenges that come from the differences, between the business community, the private sector, and humanitarian organisations, not just the UN.”
Can it work? Humanitarians and entrepreneurs don’t always think the same way…
“When I hear about private public partnerships, I always say about in terms of the private ‘what’s in it for them?’ And the question of a private company being totally neutral or altruistic, I still have my doubts,” concludes Daniel Warner, political analyst.
Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Folks, and this is a production from SwissInfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.
Speaker 3:In today's programme, In southern Turkey, buildings crumble like sand.
Speaker 2:Every member of Sarade is a volunteer, so no one gets paid for any of the work we do. Our sole aim is to minimize human suffering due to the impact of natural or man-made disasters. Right now new earthquake hits. The buildings fall down. These buildings fall down, everything falls down around.
Speaker 4:We were expecting a big earthquake in Istanbul and we were calculating the number of people that are going to lose their lives and the number of economic losses. The role of businesses there was to be prepared before and help the economic recovery afterwards.
Speaker 3:Rescue teams are still trying to find survivors, more than 90 hours after the quakes. The UN says more help is on its way and has urged governments not to hinder aid supplies.
Speaker 5:We often see the challenges come from the differences between the business community, the private sector and humanitarian organizations, not just the UN.
Speaker 4:Excavators clear the rubble. She only has a few hours to salvage whatever she can.
Speaker 6:When I hear about private public partnerships, I always say in terms of the private, what's in it for them? And the question of a private company being totally neutral or altruistic. I still have my doubts.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogen Folks, and today, exactly one year after the devastating earthquakes that shook Turkey and Syria, we're going to take a look at earthquake response. How do emergency workers even begin when the destruction as it was last year is so great, when whole towns are flattened? How do international teams work with local emergency services? We'll be getting an inside look at a search and rescue team and then later we'll be hearing about a UN initiative to harness the skills, experience and resources of local business when disaster strikes.
Speaker 2:But first, my name is Philip Kiratoff, I'm Bulgarian and I work as a structural engineer in London. I am also a volunteer urban search and rescue engineer and technician with search and rescue assistance in disasters or in the UK.
Speaker 1:When the earthquake struck on February 6th last year, philip and his Sarade urban search and rescue team were in the UK, but seeing the news from Turkey, they knew that Sarade as a United Nations classified rescue team would be called on.
Speaker 2:Sarade is 100% volunteer charity, so every member of Sarade is a volunteer, so no one gets paid for any of the work we do. Our sole aim is minimize human suffering due to the impact of natural or man-made disasters, and usually that will mean urban search and rescue and the aftermath of earthquakes or any other, as I said, natural disasters. We are also classified with the UN.
Speaker 1:How soon were you sent to Turkey after the earthquake?
Speaker 2:So Sarade sent a team of 19 people in two groups. The earthquake occurred on the 6th of February and we sent a first team of eight people on the 7th of February and I went with the second group of 11,. 11 more people went on the 9th of February, so two and a half to three days after the event.
Speaker 1:What were your impressions when you got there, when you saw what had happened?
Speaker 2:I think the scale of destruction in Turkey was different to anything I'd seen. We were deployed to Karaman Marash, which is the city very close to the second earthquake event that happened, and it had neighborhoods that were basically totally destroyed. We're talking about very heavy, multi-story rainforest concrete buildings that have basically suffered total collapse.
Speaker 1:Something that always I ask myself when I see this. Is somebody from outside? Skilled, yes, but you arrive on the scene of real destruction. How do you know where to start?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a very key point and I think this is probably where our conversation should focus on for a little while. But coordination and organization and protocols are extremely key in such an event, because in such a huge scale disaster, there needs to be a system to be followed to be able to be effective. So the most important thing we train for is being effective, because we arrive in a situation that is heavily burdened from all sides, from the sheer damage and loss of lives to resource depletion and so on. So if you're not effective, if you go there and you're not ready to and knowing how to start, you're basically adding to the burden, and this is not what we want to do.
Speaker 2:There's different levels of assessment, search and rescue within the guidelines by which we follow, being a UN classified team, and the first one is what is called the white area assessment, which is basically a reconnaissance exercise, where teams are sent out to do a preliminary assessment of where the damage is, which is rough and ready. We then go into the next level, which is then what we call triage, so basically trying to identify sites in which there are live victims trapped within the collapse and then try to estimate the duration of time which is going to take to extricating, and this is followed by the actual search and rescue exercise, where we try to exactly locate the victim, devise a method by which to provide access to the victim and then safely extricate them.
Speaker 1:When we see a search and rescue. If we watch the news, it's always narrowed down to the few seconds when somebody is found alive inside a collapsed building under the rubble. I have a feeling that the reality of the work is not quite like that.
Speaker 2:So, if I can give you an example that transcribe this by using another girl, the first group of eight sorry members was sent to assist with coordination, because we also trained to provide coordination capability, and as they arrived they were basically called to a live rescue by a should I call friendly team to us, which is a German German light user team called at fire. So they got in touch with our team and they basically said we've been working on this site for 12 hours, we're absolutely exhausted and we're struggling to continue. Could you please come and give us help and basically rotate in our place? Because the situation was that there was a mother and her young son Within the basement of a six story building that has collapsed. On top of the basement basically banked what we call the floor slabs were just touching each other. So our team went there and assisted them with whatever we could. We had a medic and engineers that took over the rescue mission.
Speaker 3:An urgent call for quiet. These rescuers need complete silence. They've heard voices. A British, german team are helping local people to search. They risk their lives for moments like this A mother and child pulled from the ruins, freezing, exhausted but alive.
Speaker 2:And within another more than six hours from when our team went to help, they managed to rescue the mother and her son out of the basement. So, yeah, it can take a very long time. We trained to do 12 hour rotations, so the idea is that we have rotation every 12 hours because if you do know there's a live person in the rubble, you're not gonna leave them alone.
Speaker 1:People in the earthquake zone who've been affected by it must invest a lot of hope in you.
Speaker 2:Yes, I presume so. I think this is. I think our role is important in at least two ways. So one is the direct search and rescue, actually saving people. However, we need to be realistic. In a disaster of the scale of Turkey, you can only have a resource to attend to collapses. You don't have the resource to basically search all the rubble because it's so huge. However, you know, and this is really important, and you know, and we were part of saving people's lives, and that's absolutely key. That's what we do, that's what we train for.
Speaker 2:But there's another, another part of it which is basically showing people that are affected that they're not alone. So that's more of a sort of social support to the local people, because as you arrive in your uniform and you wear whichever countries flag on your shoulder, you know they feel like there's someone that has come to support them in difficult situation during, and I think that brings back hope.
Speaker 1:One thing and this is something it's also slightly journalists perspective we show only the short bits, the rescue bits. We also, I think, have a tendency to say why aren't the helpers there sooner, why aren't they working faster? I suspect that that is a lack of understanding about how some of these things work.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I think that's a major discussion point in these situations and obviously I want to delve into this. But Syria was one instance where assistance was essential, but maybe it was more limited than what happened in Turkey, and you know in part what happened in Syria answers that question, which is that we only would deploy if a request for international assistance has been issued. We wouldn't go there of our own accord. That's what we call disaster tourism. That's what we try to avoid. So that's one thing. We, you know, we train and we are ready to react 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As quick as it sounds, it's what we try to do. As long as there is a request for us to deploy, we can deploy the team within 24 hours. But, you know, this is obviously on the basis that there's already been a request for assistance, and this may take a much longer, while for many different reasons.
Speaker 2:I'll give an example. As the recent earthquakes in Morocco, the damage was in very, very remote areas that were very difficult to get, to which point the Moroccan government made a decision to only invite teams from country they have bilateral agreements with and not issue a blanket international assistance request, because they didn't know what they're going to be able to do with a big amount of international teams descending on Morocco. So I suppose people that listen to your podcast or when you build, they'll understand that the complexity of the situation unfortunately leads to delays on a lot of the occasions where a disaster happens. But, you know, we should try and work towards minimizing that and trying to, you know, include more countries into cooperating for the readiness to respond to a disaster, so that this can become, you know, a quicker exercise.
Speaker 1:I have been talking to this group so that the UN has kind of developed hooking up humanitarian relief, disaster response with local communities and local business communities. How important is it for you, when you land in a place and maybe you've never been there before to communicate and coordinate with people who know the area.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely essential. There cannot be a search and rescue phase without the intelligence, information of the local community. International youths are teams primary role as assistance to the locals. We're not there to lead any effort, we're there to assist where and as required. So you know. Also, of course, we can do nothing without understanding the situation, without knowing where people may be trapped, without understanding the building typologies, the construction typologies and so on. So this is on the community side. You know we're very much reliant on the information from the local community.
Speaker 1:Philip Kira's off there with some really interesting insights into how an international search and rescue team works. And, as you heard him say, despite all their undoubted engineering skills, an international team like SARAID needs the input, the knowledge and the experience of local people. That's something the UN recognizes. In the past, too many humanitarian efforts have been less efficient than they might have been because international teams fly in and try to hit the ground running, without taking time to assess their surroundings and talk to locals about what's needed where. But in 2016, the UN created its connecting business initiative. It's run jointly by the UN's office for humanitarian affairs, or OCHA, and the UN development program, undp. The aim to engage the private sector strategically before, during and after emergencies and, by doing so, increase the scale and effectiveness of emergency response and recovery.
Speaker 1:Now it sounds logical who knows a local community better? Who might have trucks available? Who knows where the power lines are? Who has local IT skills? The answer local people, local businesses. But does it work? Humanitarians and business entrepreneurs are not necessarily cut from the same cloth. Their goals and motivations can be very different, but when that massive earthquake hit turkey last year, the local office of the connecting business initiatives sprang into action. To find out how that went, I got the initiative's reasonary, erhan Arslan of the Turkish enterprise and business confederation Turkon Fed, and our own analyst, daniel Warner, all into our virtual studio. Riza and Erhan joined us from Istanbul and they began by telling us what those first hours were like when the earthquake hit.
Speaker 5:I came from the Philippines, so I've always prepared myself for that scenario. When I would one day wake up and see messages that they magnitude 7.2, the big earthquake, or the big one we call it in in Metro Manila will also happen. It happened on a Monday here in my second home. It happened around 4 am and when I woke up, we have this WhatsApp group with the CBI member networks all around the world and the messages just exploded.
Speaker 4:So that was the first sign that when I saw it and I said something's up we were expecting a big earthquake in Istanbul and we were calculating the potential, the number of people that are going to lose their lives and the number of economic losses. And there are earthquakes, but there are also landslides, fires in Turkey, so Turkey is a disaster prone country for that region Kahraman, maraş, hatay, gazi, antep and the surrounding regions. We were, of course, expecting a disaster, but the role of businesses there was to be prepared before and help the economic recovery afterwards. And we knew that the problem was very big because the internet infrastructure was down, the phones didn't work, we couldn't reach out to no one in the first few hours, and the magnitude of this disaster is so big that the follow-up disaster, the second earthquake, was bigger than the first one.
Speaker 1:Tell us, then, what you've been doing in the months since. You know, as a journalist, you know we leave a week off and after a disaster and we kind of forget about it, but obviously the damage is still there.
Speaker 4:So the first 48 hours we tried to come up with a situation report. That was the first thing we tried to do damage assessment in the first 48 hours and then the first three days where human lives can be saved from the rubbles. We urged our members to take part in the life-saving aspect of it, and for the second one we gathered our disaster emergency desk to coordinate the efforts that our members brought together by humanitarian aid. So in the first two weeks our members were able to bring together $11 million worth of supplies, food, blankets and other emergency aids that the people may need in the region. And then we moved on the second phase, which was shelter, since people lost their houses and, if they were lucky, they were alive. They had places to live and they had places to go work, which was the economic recovery aspect of it.
Speaker 4:That's where we are at the moment. We are on the second step, and the third step would be the economic recovery of that region. We know that that region was already economically disadvantaged. Now it's going to be even further behind. We have to come up with ways to remedy the disparity of development.
Speaker 1:Danny, you've got a number of things I think you ought to say.
Speaker 6:Well, I mean $11 million of supplies and the interest of the private is certainly positive. But I have a very crude, simple question. The object of private sector is to make money. The object of the humanitarian is humanitarian. There are two different mentalities there. It's not just a question of language. I know that you say it's a win-win situation, but for business people, aren't they interested in making money?
Speaker 1:Erhan, I think you were our first to answer that.
Speaker 4:Well, the answer is a careful yes. In times like these, of course, the businesses the raison d'etre of businesses is to make money, as you said, but at times like these you can also look at it through a strategic standpoint. What I mean by that is you have to get, as the business community, get the supply chain going again from that region to other regions and vice versa. After the earthquake, our situation report shows that large enterprises were standing most of them, I would say 90% and the smaller enterprises, conversely, were torn down because the buildings were torn down and the stores under the buildings were torn down. So smaller enterprises had to get going first to supply to larger and medium enterprises and the workforce had to have a home to go to work. It was that simple if you look at it from that business and profit mentality, but at the same time, the first 14 days, that mentality paused and tried to save human lives.
Speaker 1:And how do you guys get on with each other? I'm just wondering on the one side you've got the United Nations and kind of the United Nations lens on things, and on the other is the business. I mean, riza, do you find different perspectives coming up against each other in a disaster response where you've got business and then humanitarian trying to work together?
Speaker 5:I'm glad you asked that. It makes logical sense for businesses to be involved and I wish that the UN keeps on doing a much better job in this. But among the many partners and we know this that get involved in humanitarian response, there's always this one actor which is critical but oftentimes overlooked due to various reasons, and that is the business community. And I know exactly how this feels because before joining the UN I was also from the private sector. So day one when we made sure to connect with with Turkey and Fed, with their members, also provided information to the other CBI member networks who are asking information how they can help, we knew that there is an opportunity and a need actually to bring the business community, the local and international private sector actors, closer to the coordination mechanism that's being set up before the Turkey or Kirk response. So that's why I was deployed as the private sector engagement focal point, supporting the UN humanitarian coordination mechanism and the response. But what I did at the time was facilitate connections, provide information, liaise with local and international business actors who wanted to support the humanitarian response and really making sure that everyone understands how important it is to include the private sector during the response but at the same time during recovery.
Speaker 5:You've heard from Erhan really from the very very first day. From the beginning, private sector has been there. When the UN mission, the international search and rescue missions, were asking for help when it comes to accommodation in the affected areas, we immediately asked Turkan Fed is this something that you can help us with? Given the gap, how can we augment or support the UN mission, the different international search and rescue missions who are finding it difficult to book accommodation or find accommodation in the affected areas? Turkan Fed really provided that opportunity. They gave the international SAR missions or search and rescue missions with hotels in the affected provinces where the hotels were still working, and that really helped the incoming missions. When they asked for trucks, turkan Fed and their members mobilized trucks to help the search and rescue mission to transport their things in the affected provinces.
Speaker 5:So we know that no one actor can do this alone, but I do want to say that there have been challenges and lessons learned when it comes to how the business community engage in humanitarian response. We've oftentimes see the challenges come from the differences between the business community, the private sector and humanitarian organizations, not just the UN, and this stems from the language, the approach the pace that the different actors use so practically, when the UN's uses terms that normally the private sector is not familiar with. And then you have the business community, that they also have their own way of doing things, and we see that this is you know. This difference sometimes leads to the inability to coordinate our activities properly and can result to duplicating efforts. That's why we wanted to make sure that there is that focal point, or an opportunity to make each other the business community, the UN or the humanitarian agencies understand each other when it comes to the response.
Speaker 1:Erhan, I'll bring you first. Do you want to respond to that? Do you think you guys understand each other now?
Speaker 4:I can say we are closer than ever. I want to underline one point that Riza mentioned, because not one actor can do it all. So when this earthquake happened, we had to learn a lot of new things that we haven't known for years and years in terms of logistics, in terms of accommodation, in terms of communication timing for instance, what truck can carry these tents or what truck can carry these containers of food, and what communication is the best way to reach out, or which hotels are open? How can we communicate or reach out to this actor? We had a crisis desk of 15 people and they had to excel at these missions for the next 10 days, but they had to be advanced in these situations in the next 48 hours after the earthquake. So it was a very dire task again, since the earthquake was very big. Earthquakes were big, so now our coordination efforts are more aligned and we know what to do better next time as lesson learned.
Speaker 6:The humanitarian organizations are supposed to be neutral, involved in a situation, a private enterprise or a company is difficult to see how it's neutral, because they have certain self-interest. That's what companies do. How can you convince me that your companies are neutral when they're involved in a humanitarian crisis?
Speaker 1:Which of you would like to answer that I told you there would be some devil's advocate questions.
Speaker 6:That's my role.
Speaker 4:So to convince you, we have to look at some numbers. Businesses have to take precautions to sustain their survival. The businesses that are set up today, 50% of them are not going to be around in the first five years and 70% of them are not going to be around in the next 10 years. So, when you look at it, you have to be prepared in every way your supply chain, your human resources, your disaster resilience, its preparedness towards it. It's a package. As a business owner or an employee, that mentality is one of the key factors to sustain the survival of any businesses, in my opinion.
Speaker 6:Do you think the private sector has political advantages over the UN agencies in terms of being able to go into certain regions where certain UN agencies might be declined access?
Speaker 5:Maybe I can answer that because I've seen it as well in some of the affected provinces and also in other countries where we have CBI member networks brokering those engagements, because at the end of the day, they are seen as local actors, they are trusted more by the government, they're trusted more by the local authorities and even by the NGOs, organizations that operate in these communities. So the answer is 3DS, basically because they know that they are embedded in the communities where they operate and they have the existing networks, they have the intelligence that sometimes the UN, your UN agencies or other international NGOs would normally not have in a particular situation.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you very much. We've come just about to the end. Very interesting for me, especially because, like I said, I've spent years reporting sometimes in the field, but often from Geneva on disaster humanitarian crises and not heard too much about this aspect of it. Very interesting and very promising, I think, from my point of view. Danny, I'm going to come to one last question for you, and then each to Erhan and Riza. But are you convinced, danny, because you've been so skeptical?
Speaker 6:for the last half hour. Being skeptical is my nature, remember, I'm from the Bronx. I'm slightly encouraged by what I've heard, but when I hear about private public partnerships, I always say, in terms of the private, what's in it for them? And the question of a private company being totally neutral or altruistic. I still have my doubts, but you've made me rethink the problem, thank you.
Speaker 1:Erhan, let me ask you how are things now? What are your next steps going forward?
Speaker 4:Well for the people in the field in the earthquake affected regions. Some of them have temporary housing, some of them are able to move back to their houses because it was slightly damaged or not damaged at all, and they are trying to find ways to reinstall the economic activities. For us to propel that economic recovery is the key aspect of how we go on, how we go forward from this.
Speaker 1:Riza. Then final words to you. It's still relatively new, the Connecting Business Initiative. What's your ideal for how it should grow over the next few years?
Speaker 5:The healthy skepticism, such as what Daniel mentioned, is really what keeps us up at night, but at the same time, it helps us understand and a reminder of the things that we need to do to move them needle when it comes to how we define the role of the businesses in preparedness, response and recovery. It's been seven years. We started with a couple of CBI member networks during the World Humanitarian Summit and now we're 15 networks strong, and these networks are always a constant inspiration to us of the different ways they work with their government partners, the way they work with the UN, and we do hope that we always showcase the work that they do in national, regional and global platforms, amplifying their stories that this can work. Working with the private sector it can work, and that it can lead to better communities and resilient societies.
Speaker 1:That brings us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. My thanks to Philip Kirazov Rizaneri, erhan Arslan and Daniel Warner for sharing their time, experiences and analysis with us. If you enjoyed this edition of the podcast, do join us next time when we'll be assessing the war in Ukraine. What is Russia's plan two years on? How strong is the West's commitment to defending Ukraine and can the United Nations play any role in ending this conflict, or is it reduced to handing out aid parcels? That's out on February 20th, and check out some of our previous episodes of Inside Geneva, including in-depth interviews with the men and women who've done what's called the UN's toughest job UN Human Rights Chief. You can find us, subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva from Swiss Info, the international public media company of Switzerland. It's available in many languages as well as English, so check out our other content at wwwswissinfoch. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening and do join us next time on Inside Geneva.