“Beyond Saturday, little chance of finding survivors”, says a former firefighter

MISE À DAY

A guest on QUB radio, a former firefighter who went on a rescue mission in Adana, Turkey, believes that beyond Saturday, there is a risk of not finding survivors of the earthquake.  

“I think Saturday is the limit for finding the living,” said Patrick Villardry on Wednesday, who is also a dog handler with some 600 search missions to his credit, in which he found 49 people alive.

Mr. Villardry explains the rescue process and how he does it with his volunteer teams, citing the case where a person was located in a cellar under a pile of scrap metal, after a 5-storey building collapsed. 

Using a jackhammer to gain access to the cellar, Villardry was able to save a living cat, while several people were found dead under the rubble, with the cold making the rescuers' mission difficult.

The former firefighter specifies that in this kind of situation, you must first send a dog, which barks when there are survivors trapped under the rubble, before sending, after a work of sustained stripping, another dog to see if he adopts the same attitude. 

From there, if victims, often in a state of hypothermia, can hit with a stone, we will arrive to hear with devices that require total silence, explained at the microphone of Philippe-Vincent Foisy.