MUZAFFARABAD, Oct 14: They had nicknamed her Emma. Found miraculously alive under the rubble on Wednesday, rescue workers toiled delicately for hours to pull her out. But an aftershock made the team leave and when they returned for one more effort on Thursday morning, Emma was dead.
The Turkish and British rescue workers in Muzaffarabad, the earthquake-ravaged capital of Pakistani Kashmir, run the series of events over and over again in their heads.
Distraught, they wrestle with questions about guilt, duty and danger and wonder what they could have done differently.
But, they repeat to themselves, they had no choice. At 1:24 am on Thursday, a new earthquake of 5.6 on the Richter scale left the collapsed house too dangerous to work on.
It was around noon on Wednesday when, against all odds, dogs from Turkey and Germany spotted the 22-year-old woman, a full five days after the massive Earthquake.
The dogs barked at two places, signalling life under the rubble. But the crumbled building in Muzaffarabad’s old city risked being crushed to the ground by a 20-ton piece of cement roof hovering above.
The British volunteers were overjoyed. The dogs had pinpointed the exact point where she was.
“We were confident. The night before we had found someone else alive in the old city, a 74-year-old man, who had been there for four days and escaped without injury,” said Geoff Parkinson, a 38-year-old farmer who is part of the Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters group.
For hours they meticulously scraped their way into the rubble to find a safe way to get Emma out. With some wood they held up the roof that threatened the whole structure. And they gave her an English nickname.
“Emma! Emma!” they cried out, knocking on the cement in hopes she would respond.
And then, the new quake.
“It came as a shock as we were just about to reach her. We left the site for 10 minutes then came back. But the structure had begun to crumble a little bit when the team left — it was clear that the house was falling down and had become dangerous,” Mr Parkinson said.
The next decision was agonizing.
“We worked hard but the site had become too dangerous so we had to leave it,” said team member Daniel Davis, a 20-year-old student. “It was terrible, as if we had abandoned her.”
As they returned to their camp they cried. When they returned on Thursday morning they didn’t utter a word to one another. All that was on everyone’s mind was the hope that Emma was still alive.
But within 15 minutes, the dogs gave their verdict — they no longer barked. The odour of a decomposing body provided confirmation. Shortly afterward, the corpse was found. As the team had expected, the cement had collapsed overnight. She died underneath it.
On the site, there was silence.
“I don’t know anymore what I felt ... guilt. But we did everything we could,” said Davis, who was on an earthquake site for the first time.
“She was alive and now she’s dead,” said Fahri Akdemir, a 24-year-old Turkish rescuer. “Maybe it’s our fault, or maybe it’s someone else’s or the aftershock’s.”
Parkinson’s thoughts keep going back to the events of that night.
“We tried to see if we could have done something differently. But the only thing we could do was to leave. If not the team would have been injured or killed,” he said.
“There wasn’t any choice. But if the earthquake came six hours later, the story could have ended differently.”—AFP
