Eighteen local firefighters boarded a plane to Hong Kong early Monday morning on route to Nepal, where a magnitude 7.8 earthquake decimated the small Asian country this weekend.
On Saturday, Burnaby fire Chief Doug McDonald received a call from retired firefighter Mark Pullen asking if any members would be willing to volunteer for the Canadian Medical Assistance Team, a group that would be sending rescue teams to Kathmandu, Nepal.
“In 24 hours, we had got 18 eighteen members to go,” McDonald said.
The firefighters travelling to Nepal are all responsible for paying their own way and are required to get other members to cover their shifts while they’re away. The department, however, provided them with supplies and equipment to take with them overseas.
“They’ve taken some high level search equipment” he said. “It’s some listening equipment, which they can listen into the buildings to hear if anyone is taping, and they also have cameras, similar to Go Pros but smaller, that they can stick on wands … and actually stick them into the voids of the building and look.”
The firefighters who are heading to Nepal will be working as front line search and rescue officers, searching through debris and buildings before any other teams. They’ll be searching for people still trapped inside, McDonald said.
This isn’t the first time firefighters from Burnaby have travelled to places in need. Two years ago, the department sent a team to southern Alberta to help with relief efforts following the devastating floods in Calgary, High River and surrounding areas.
Pullen, who helped implement the department’s urban search and rescue training program, a program that teaches firefighters how to conduct search and rescue efforts in urban centres following a disaster, has experience in this kind of situation.
In 2010, the Burnaby firefighter travelled to Haiti to help with search and rescue efforts following its own devastating earthquake, and was also in the United States after Hurricane Katrina hit, McDonald said.
Pullen and the rest of the crew are expected to be in Kathmandu for several days. They’re scheduled to return to Burnaby next Monday.
