With only a microphone and a dog, our volunteers found 31 survivors of the earthquake. Without help from Bulgaria, however, no one recognizes them as saviors, who wanted to put them with the refugees
With only the help of a microphone, a dog and non-professional equipment bought from a sports store, Bulgarian volunteer rescuers managed to find 31 survivors under the debris in Turkey.
For nearly a week, the 47 volunteers participated in the search for living people after the earthquakes. As the Bulgarian volunteer squad was the worst equipped of all the rescue teams.
“We could only carry out search, not rescue,
because we don’t have the equipment”, explained team leader Georgi Vlaikov. (See an interview with him below.)
“No matter how many videos you see on the Internet, nothing will prepare you for the smell there, the first thing you encounter,” Vlaikov described the situation in Turkey.
The volunteers are disappointed with the Bulgarian state for not helping, but having to provide transport, food and shelter themselves.
“The state does not recognize the volunteers from “Cave Rescue” as rescuers, no one there recognizes us and they wanted to place us with the refugees.
Chaos reigned, it was anarchy,
there was no organization. There was no one to stand behind us and say: Rely on them, they know what they are doing”, said Dimitar Hristov – head of the second rescue team in Antakya.
Volunteers want to build a rescue pod. So they will be prepared and follow prescribed procedures, as well as have the equipment to be able to respond to large-scale disasters. The rest of the donations will probably be used for its creation, explained the chairman of the National Association of Volunteers Yasen Tsvetkov.
“We received 270 donations, from BGN 5 to BGN 30,000. Their total amount is BGN 83,773, and our expenses are BGN 22,000,” Tsvetkov specified.
Georgi Vlaikov, head of the first team of volunteers in Turkey: There is a fine line between gratitude and aggression among the relatives of the victims
– Mr. Vlaikov, which moment stuck in your mind from the week in Turkey?
– Many things made an impression, but one thing touched me when we traveled there. There were long queues at gas stations, there was no fuel or it was limited. The policemen were making way for us to load with priority. We were worried about making people angry because we were rearranging 40 cars. But when we entered the gas station, got a few things to eat and filled up with fuel, two people came and saw the words “Rescuer” on our clothes.
They pushed us out of the cash register and paid our bill. This happened at least three or four times
One paid for our fuel, another for the wiper fluid. My other memory is when we were doing night shifts. There were people driving around at 2-3 in the morning with hot food and bread cooked inside. They carried for the people who spend the night in the buildings, because not everyone slept in tents. They slept in the entrances of the undamaged buildings, got two mattresses from somewhere, break tables and chairs and warm themselves with them. And when the food truck passed a place where we work, the people in it would give to us first. It made us very uncomfortable because we saw the six-layered clothes lying on mattresses at the entrances, we knew that this food was for them, and we tried to refuse the food. “No, it’s for you”, however, they were categorical.
– But there were also people who pelted the rescuers with stones.
– From a moment on, the line between gratitude and aggression becomes very thin. For example, we are working on the house on the left, but there is a person next to us whose relatives are in the house on the right. He comes and wants us to start work where his relatives are. However, we cannot work at the same time, it takes time for us to survey one object. We are also given GPS coordinates to go to. We may have to go through several streets after finishing this building.
People see us working 10 meters away from their loved ones and then we leave
This gives rise to aggression in them. The case with Japanese colleagues was similar. We want to help, but from a certain point things get risky.
– Finding living people under the debris is your great motivation, but was there anything that made you despair?
– No one was close to a point where they gave up. Our demotivation was rather that we could not directly see the result of our search. We hear a person, pass the signal, another team comes, we give them the information and go to the next site. We don’t know if there was a living person there, if they managed to get him out. In the evening or in the morning at briefings, we tried through the reports given by the other teams, through the locations where they took out alive people, to establish whether we had found them. No one was giving us information on how many people we found.
