(Dobbs) Why Is The Search So Agonizingly Slow?
There still could be life in that collapsed condo in Florida
If you want to know why the search has gone so slowly for survivors in that calamitous condo collapse in Florida— with hopes diminishing through every successive minute— I turn to an earthquake more than 40 years ago in Italy, and a lady named Lisa.
It was November 23rd, 1980. The earthquake struck southeast of Naples at just past 7:30 on a Sunday night. With epicenters in three different parts of the Apennine Mountains, the ground under more than a hundred isolated towns and villages shook for 70 life-shattering seconds.
I happened to be with a camera crew covering a story that evening in Frankfurt, Germany, when ABC News headquarters reached us and said there’d been a powerful earthquake and we should charter a jet and get there as quickly as we could. They would fill us in when we landed in Naples. But by the time we touched down in the middle of the night, there was little more to tell us. It was still dark, the region was rural, and communications had been cut.
What they had been able to do though was hire a helicopter. So we got our bearings, found the helicopter, and flew into the unknown.
For three days, setting down randomly from town to town and village to village, we interviewed survivors and videotaped rubble in an ever-wider sweep of wreckage. We found our way to Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, where more than 20 children died in an orphanage. We got to Balvano, where a church collapsed and killed more than a hundred parishioners during a Sunday evening mass, and in a scene I’ll never forget, Pope John Paul II also had flown in and he stopped workers carrying out a corpse and turned back the dirty sheet covering the victim’s mangled face and planted a kiss on his temple. We landed in Lioni, where in another sight still vivid in my head, survivors digging down to the ruins of a home whose roof had fallen in found a young family of four, slumped dead over their table, still set with its red-and-white checkered tablecloth, the meals on their plates still intact.
But the most dramatic of all we saw was in the village of Laviano. That’s where we saw Lisa.
It was Wednesday, Day Three after the earthquake. We had landed at the edge of this devastated village and were just wandering, looking for something we hadn’t seen before, when we heard shouting from the top of a pile of rubble. My sound technician, Italian himself and therefore fluent, told me that somewhere deep down in the ruins of a three-story apartment building, searchers thought they’d heard a human sound.
Quickly talking to survivors in the village and determining who was still missing, they figured that it must be a woman named Lisa.
Then, for six hours, stick by stick, stone by stone, with her small screams weakening, rescuers dug to save her. If they broke the wrong stick or moved the wrong stone, the whole pile of rubble might have collapsed, burying Lisa even deeper, and pitching them (and us, who had scaled the pile to report on what was happening) down on top of her.
But despite the danger, one worker after another dug head-first, upside down in the hole. Until finally, one of them pulled himself up and with a face badly bloodied by his exertions in the rough and narrow aperture, shouted like it was the best day of his life, “I touched Lisa’s hand, my blood doesn’t matter.”
It was a few hours more before they extricated Lisa from that hole. But she was alive. It’s hard to call her lucky, because of the two things had saved her life. One was, Lisa was mentally disabled, and doctors later told me that she probably never understood the gravity of the danger she was in. The other was, she had ended up in a sort of bubble, protected from the heavy stone and beams of the building by the corpse of her mother, who had been buried on top of her.
But Lisa didn’t die.
Today, at the collapse in Florida, it is Day Three. But there could still be a Lisa down there in the ruins. So they haven’t yet switched from rescue mode, which is sensative, to recovery, which is faster.
So the search is understandingly meticulous and frustratingly slow. They are impeded by fire and smoke from deep in the rubble. They are working in a 30-foot-high mountain of metal and concrete, the remains of a 12-story structure before it fell. They are delicately using everything from heavy cranes to their own hands— plus electronic tools like microphones and drones— to try to detect any remaining human life. They are threatened by the prospect that the rest of the building, the part that didn’t collapse, without warning will tumble to the ground itself.
And yet, as the mayor of Miami-Dade said, "We are not going to go into a recovery mode until we have exhausted every possible measure of finding anyone in this rubble."
They are hoping to touch the hand of a lady like Lisa.
That’s why they’re going so slowly.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.