Dramatic rescue accounts fromIsrael’s rescue delegation inTurkey's catastrophic earthquake scene
Unit commander Brig. Gen. (res.) Golan Vach, who returned to Israel with his delegation at the beginning of the week (the Foreign Ministry denied the rumor that the Hatzolah rescue delegation left due to an imminent security threat), told Mishpacha that this was one of the most difficult and complex rescue missions he’s ever experienced. And he’s no stranger to destruction — this is the eighth mission he’s taken part in, some of them as commander.
“I’ve been on a lot of missions, but I’ve never experienced what we saw here the last few days,” he said. “We were assigned a certain zone and had to comb through it, although no one believed that anyone could still be alive underneath all those collapsed structures.”
Vach was part of the delegation that went to Brazil after that country’s dam disaster in January 2019, when the dam released a massive mudflow that advanced downstream, sweeping away houses, farms, inns, and roads. He was on the scene that same year in the aftermath of the 2019 earthquake in Albania, and remembers that, “One of the most difficult experiences I took part in was the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, which took over 200,000 lives.” He was also part of the rescue mission to the building collapse in Surfside, Florida in the summer of 2021. There, 98 bodies were extracted from the rubble, among them 32 Jewish men, women, and children, which the mission helped bring to kever Yisrael.
Yet despite all that, Vach said the Turkey disaster is different from anything he’s seen to date: “It was a very difficult experience; it was a very complex mission. We were the only delegation that managed to extract so many people alive. As soon as we arrived, we realized that this wouldn’t be like anything we’d seen before. First of all, everything was dark. There was no electricity and not a drop of light. There wasn’t really a city left. There isn’t a single street in the city that wasn’t damaged and not even an alley you can walk or drive down.
Create a free account to keep reading.
