Imagine the scene: There is a man trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building.
If you make one wrong move, you could crush him.
He’s losing circulation to his arm and is battling to stay calm.
There are tons of concrete and steel beams everywhere with no clear path to the man for your crew to assist. What would YOU do? Rescuers don’t get to choose… For their commitment and skill in managing a very difficult rescue situation, the 100-crew rescue team involved in this incident has been selected as a finalist in the 2015 Centrum® Guardians campaign.
On Wednesday the 25th of June 2014 at 7am, the Jabulani Fire Station in Soweto was dispatched to a structural collapse of an old building at Orlando Towers in Power Park. When they arrived, the crew realised the seriousness of the incident.
The front of the building, a disused power station, was still standing, but large sections of the structure behind the front façade had collapsed.
Initial reports indicated that there were 18 people trapped under the rubble. Incident Commander Netshituni called Heavy Duty Rescue (HDR), Urban Search and Rescue (USAR), medical and the South African Police Service (SAPS) for backup.
The crew treated the first patient who was found on the outside of the building, close to the main entrance gate, where he was prepared for transportation to hospital.
The crew knew that they had to evacuate the building, as it was unstable and unsafe. The building is roughly the size of a rugby field, which is massive! The crew walked around the building and called out in the hope that the people who were trapped under the rubble would hear them.
People replied to their calls; they were understandably hysterical! The crew managed to establish that there were three people trapped in the first area. Two of them were close together and could see each other, while the third man could hear the others but could not see them.
The crew marked the area where the men were located by using hazard tape and left one crew member to reassure them that help had arrived while the rest of the crew continued on with the initial size up.
A fourth and fifth victim replied to their calls towards the back of the building. By now, the HDR vehicle and first members of the USAR crew were on site. Management divided the scene into two sectors, leaving each sector with a staging area for the equipment.
It is important to note that only qualified USAR Technicians could work inside the structure and that specialised equipment was necessary. For this reason, the incident commander contacted Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality Emergency Services, West Rand District Municipality Emergency Services and Rescue SA for assistance.
Three patients were located in the first sector while the fourth and fifth victims were located in the second sector. It was imperative to firstly establish the safety of the working sectors before any work could start to get to the patients.
The crew had to stabilise the immediate working area while other crews were tasked with stabilising the access routes to each sector. There was a danger of a secondary collapse of the unstable sections, which had not fully collapsed yet.
While some crews started to stabilise the walls and the roof, moving rubble and concrete and removing concrete blocks, the other crews began the rescue operations.
Other crews were tasked to continue on the search for more patients and the search and rescue dogs were used to locate more patients and bodies. In all instances, the crew had to go through concrete rubble to get to the patients.
The rescue operation was in full swing by 10am. As Fana Mnguni from City of Johannesburg Emergency Management Services said, “The longer we worked, the more we realised that we needed more hands to help us as some of the concrete blocks took two hours to move.”
When it started to get dark, a call was made to Off Road Rescue Unit to provide assistance with lighting. In order to reach patients two and three, the technicians had to drill through a concrete floor. They had to cut through the steel I-beams that were about one metre wide and sometimes up to 15 metres long.
They managed to free the second patient by 7pm. He was stabilised and transported to hospital. Patient three was freed shortly thereafter – the crew had to cut through steel and remove concrete and rubble before managing to free him and transport him to hospital.
The incident commander sent USAR personnel to interview the patients in hospital to find out how many people had been in the building when it collapsed; their injuries were fortunately moderate. The information that they received from the hospital was that there were five people in the building and that these people had been stealing the steel from the building, which had caused the collapse.
The in-depth search found a deceased person close to a bakkie in the centre of the structure. The bakkie looked like a trolley as it had been flattened by the collapsed concrete and steel. Patient four was trapped deep under concrete and steel.
After digging, cutting and moving concrete for hours, one of the crew members was able to crawl through it to get to the patient. The man was lying between two steel beams and under a concrete and corrugated steel dome.
His arm was trapped under a steel beam. When Rescuer Mucavele reached the man, his mandate was to get a drip into him as the man had been trapped for nearly 10 hours. Surprisingly, he was not bleeding very much and Mucavele managed to administer the drip into his left arm.
The technicians created a space for the Advanced Life Support (ALS) paramedic to gain access to the patient. Due to the confined space and the extremely uncomfortable nature of the situation, the ALS paramedics swopped patient care duties every 30 minutes. Interestingly, at a scene of this nature, there have to be five Advanced Life Support (ALS) paramedics on duty. One ALS per sector (there were two sectors) for the rescue technicians and one ALS paramedic for the patient per sector as well as one ALS to swop patient care duties every 30 minutes.
The ALS had to crawl into the small space in order to lie next to the patient while making eye contact, talking to and reassuring him. The crew knew that they would not be able to free this patient unless his trapped right arm was amputated. They called ahead to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital and arranged for a trauma surgeon to come to the site to perform the amputation.
The incident commander sent the crew to fetch the doctors. At about 6pm, Doctor Martin Mauser, a trauma surgeon from Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, together with two anaesthetists arrived on the site. The doctor explained to the crew that he would not be able to do the amputation in the confined area and that he would require more space.
The hospital team left. Dr Mauser said, “I hoped the crew wouldn’t call me again because I was really scared to go back to the site. It felt so dangerous.”
The victim gave permission for his arm to be amputated, however, the rule of “life over limb” would have applied if he was unable to. To get to this patient, the crew considered but discarded the option to lift the steel beam as it was too heavy and could destabilise the frame.
Also, moving it could cause other movements and a further collapse. They ended up creating a hole in the corrugated steel and concrete dome above the patient, which took the crew a further four hours. While all of this was happening, the ALS paramedics continued with patient care, administering oxygen and pain medication.
In addition, the USAR team from the West Rand was shoring and stabilising the structure to enable crews and the dogs to search for bodies. Crews from City of Johannesburg, Rescue SA and Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality Emergency Services were rotated, as the work was so intense and physically exhausting.
Once the crews had managed to open up a hole in the concrete dome, Dr Mauser returned to the scene and was able to work on the patient.
“An amputation normally takes place in a sterile theatre setting, making it a quick and relatively easy procedure, but because of the limited space and the fact that the arm had to be amputated fairly close to the trunk, it was complicated and a slow process,” commented Dr Mauser.
The man’s arm was successfully amputated after some time and he could be extricated. He was alive. It was 3:30am, nearly 24 hours after the structure had collapsed, when the man was freed.
The crews consider this extrication a success because the patient came out alive and no one was injured in the process of getting him out. The search and rescue operation was called off at 4am and resumed again at 9am.
The crews located three bodies but could only extricate one. Operations stopped at midnight and continued the next morning to free the remaining two bodies.
While the rescue operations were in progress, thieves were stealing building steel, which made the structure unsafe for the rescue personnel, so SAPS had to step in.
On Friday at 10am, the remaining two bodies were freed and the operation was stopped. On Saturday, USAR crew extricated another body, bringing the total number of bodies that were retrieved to eight.
This incredible team of rescue personnel worked tirelessly together for over 24 hours, amid tons of fallen concrete, steel beams, exposed rebar and jagged rubble to save five lives.
Centrum® Guardians is an initiative that showcases our nation’s multi-disciplinary and high calibre Emergency and Rescue Services to the South African public.
“These amazing truelife rescue stories highlight the fact that rescue personnel devote every ounce of their incredible strength, stamina and energy to saving lives,” commented Natasha Macdonald, the Centrum® Brand Manager.
