As a firefighter Emma Atcherley said she expects to come across distressing incidents every day, but no amount of experience could prepare her for the scenes she saw in February this year.
"The noise was incredible with the sound of sirens 24-hours a day as ambulances rushed around and diggers worked everywhere," the 43-year-old from Bedwas said. "The air was absolutely filled with dust and the people you came across were clearly in shock, upset and distraught. As time went on the smells started to change as people died in the rubble. It was sombre and frantic with emotions ranging from people being incredibly happy and thankful to us for saving their loved ones, to being so upset that we couldn't help them because their loved ones had already died."
A member of the fire service for nearly 20 years, Emma is currently a crew manager with South Wales Fire and Rescue Service based in Cardiff. Since 2019 she has also volunteered her skills with the United Kingdom International Search and Rescue Team (UK-ISAR), a group of firefighters and specialist personnel from across the UK who respond to humanitarian accidents or disasters on behalf of the UK Government.
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On February 6 Emma had just returned home from a training exercise in Sweden with her UK-ISAR team when news broke of a major earthquake in central Turkey and parts of Syria, which reached a mammoth 7.8 on the Richter scale. Within hours of her arrival home to her family she was deployed for the first time with UK-ISAR to the Turkish city of Antakya, before the critical 72-hour window was up.
It all happened very quickly," the mum-of-two said. "We had cold weather training in Sweden to make sure we are ready for disasters like this. We arrived home from Sweden in the early hours of Monday morning and by 6am we were told we were going to Turkey.
"I had a sleep and didn't have much time to unpack my stuff before I had to check I had all the right kit and made my way to Birmingham airport. We didn't have much time to think about it but we knew it was a big earthquake. Although we had access to the news and we could see what was coming out at that point, it was hard to imagine what exactly we would be faced with."
Emma said her team landed in Gaziantep on Tuesday evening before they drove through the night towards their base in Hatay Stadium near Antakya. The journey was dark and rural, so Emma said it wasn't until sunrise that they realised the full extent of what had happened.
She said: "As we drove into the city in the morning it was complete chaos. There were ambulances and cars everywhere, it was so noisy. It was very difficult to get around and I can't imagine what that place looked like before the earthquake happened. I've seen pictures since and it looked absolutely beautiful, but every building had either completely collapsed, partly collapsed or had holes in the side where bricks had come down. There were no buildings that were not affected in any way in the entire city and whole roads had disappeared under the rubble. At our base at Hatay stadium there were big cracks in the floor and damage to the stadium itself."
The 77 UK-ISAR members were split into four teams and allocated different sections of the city to carry out rescues along with a medic, a dog handler and structural engineer. Emma said she was tasked with a residential area mainly comprised of flats. Within hours of arriving and setting up at their base camp, the volunteers surveyed their areas for live casualties ready to start the operation.
Emma said: "We determined which buildings may have live rescues in them. We use our search dogs to go over the rubble and sniff for live scent and we use our eyes and our ears, climb over the rubble and listen and shout. Anywhere that we thought there was a live rescue we fed that back and then a rescue takes place."
Over the course of the week she was deployed in Turkey, Emma said her team rescued eight people ranging in age from two to 91. Aside from the rescues the team found using their own senses, she said most intel came from local tip offs - mainly friends and family members of the people trapped in the buildings.
Describing some of the rescues the team carried out, Emma said: "It took us about four hours to dig a man out who had his legs trapped. He was trapped next to his parents in a block of flats and unfortunately they had died next to him. He had a serious crush injury to his leg and may well have lost his leg since, we don't know.
"There was one lady in her 50s who had been trapped for five days and survived by drinking her own urine. She was really strong and vocal, but while she was trapped she thought it was only her building that had collapsed. It must have been mind blowing to her when she came out to see the destruction of the entire city. She had no idea it had happened.
"We had another couple heavily entombed in a six-storey building that had completely collapsed. We could hear them but we didn't know where they were in the building and it took us a lot of time to find where they were. In the end we went from the building next to them which was still standing. We went through the wall of that building and through a small tunnel where they were and it took 20 hours to rescue the two of them because of how deeply entombed they were."
In a particularly distressing rescue, Emma described finding a family of four who were trapped alongside their deceased eight-year-old son. She said: "They knew they had lost their boy, but their main focus was on the little girl. When we took the little girl out the mum begged us to not give her to anyone else so our medic held on to her. It's easy for someone - not in a malicious way - to take the child to an ambulance and then have the ambulance leave, making it difficult for the family to find her again. We don't speak the language so it was hard to know what exactly they were saying, but you still got a feeling for the emotions, which were running very high."
Emma said the searches would involve the team looking and listening in the rubble, sometimes using listening devices. Once they physically found somebody she described how they would use their hands, hammers, small breaking tools and clippers to reach the person. They would tunnel through tiny spaces in the rubble on their tummies, breaking the area in front of them up and passing debris to the person behind to make headway. She said during the rescues, they would come across dead bodies. Often when people survived, it was a miracle that they had.
"They weren't trapped in areas where they could move about," she said. "These people were trapped in positions that were not comfortable and they could barely move. A lot of the time they were trapped by their legs or face down. They couldn't move around and there was no space. You couldn't really contemplate how many days had gone past while they were stuck like that."
One of the most heartbreaking parts of Emma's deployment was coming across family members whose loved ones had likely died, meaning no rescue could be carried out. She said the team needed every minute to count and go towards rescuing potential survivors.
She said: "People would come to us about their family members - sometimes children - who unfortunately had passed away. We knew this from using the dogs who indicated if they were alive or dead. It was really difficult having to tell people their loved ones had not made it
"We would also come across people who knew their loved ones had died and wanted advice. We would advise people on how they could safely dig away to get their loved one from the rubble. The custom there is to bury your loved ones very quickly, ideally within 24 hours, so deceased people were brought out in body bags and put on the side of the road, but they weren't there very long."
Meanwhile Emma said people whose homes were destroyed could be seen using various objects as shelter, while the government provided essentials to those who had lost everything. She said conditions were dusty and freezing cold, with temperatures plummeting as low as -6°C in the night.
She said: "It brings it home more when you see local people. There was a big area in the middle of the city where people gathered and the government agency that looks after disasters put tents up where they supplied big piles of clothes. There were also trucks with food. You could see people making shelter out of abandoned cars and anything else they could find because they had literally lost everything. It made me think how do you let people know you're okay because your phone is probably buried in a building somewhere and if you have got your phone, how do you charge it? And if you need medication, how do you get it? The pharmacies were destroyed."
A concern the UK-ISAR shared with locals and the Turkish government was the high likelihood of further aftershocks and earthquakes following the initial disaster, which put the remaining weakened buildings at risk of collapse, as well as disturbing the settled rubble. Emma said she experienced a number of aftershocks in the week of her deployment, including during a live rescue.
"We felt a lot of aftershocks throughout the day," she said. "Some you could feel, some you couldn't. We had an aftershock during one of our rescues while about five of us were inside a building. It was quite a big one and luckily we were all fine. there was a real danger of another earthquake while we were there. You can't eliminate the danger when you are rescuing people but you can do your very best to work safely.
"Not long after we came home there was another fairly big earthquake which brought down some of the buildings that hadn't fully collapsed. One of our interpreters was a lovely young woman and English teacher. Her house collapsed in the third earthquake. luckily she was okay but she is now living in a tent."
When Emma returned home, she said she quickly immersed herself in work and family life to keep her spirits up. She said the fire service has a fantastic support network which always helps following traumatic incidents. She said: "When we got home it almost felt like it didn't happen. I have two small children who were very happy to have me home and I immersed myself back into home life. Everybody wanted to know how it was, but it was hard to describe afterwards."
Although Emma doesn't know how all her rescues are doing now, she said the team received a heartwarming video message from one man and his family who thanked them for saving his life. She said it makes everything worth it to know how they positively changed the course of a family's life with just one rescue alone.
"We've since had a video message from one of the people we rescued. [In the video] he was with his children and his mum and other family members. That whole family has been affected by him being rescued, it affects far more people than the person you rescued. We had found him trapped in a collapsed building with a lady. They were there for five days trapped in a stairwell together. There were two buildings on either side which were still standing and then their building completely collapsed down. It was the kind of collapse where you don't usually find survivors."
In April Emma was awarded the Community Award of Excellence and Achievement from Bedwas, Trethomas and Machen Community Council for her work. Firefighters Luke Davison, of Malpas station, and Robert Buckley, of Ely station, were also awarded. Emma said she was delighted to receive the award: "I had a phone call from someone at the council who said each year they ask the community if there is anyone they think has gone above and beyond to recognise them in an awards community. She said someone in the village saw what we had done and wanted to nominate us for the award. We didn't expect it at all, it was really nice that someone thought what we did was worthy of note and enough to nominate us."
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