WHEN Ray Gray and his small team of International Rescue volunteers arrived in the earthquake-stricken Indonesian city of Padang, their first impression was that the damage was not as bad as they had expected.

The region had been hit by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake only a couple of days before. Reports spoke of more than 1,000 dead, thousands more trapped, and thousands of buildings reduced to rubble.

“It was hundreds, not thousands,” Ray says. “But there were some seriously damaged buildings.”

Ray and his small group of British volunteers were part of the UN relief effort. Their job was simple: to search through the rubble of collapsed buildings for survivors.

It was grim work. Tunnelling deep into the bowels of the ruined buildings, they found body after body, but no one alive.

They drove themselves onwards to the point of exhaustion, haunted by the thought there may be someone in there clinging to life. “It is very difficult to stop when you think that there may be people trapped in those buildings,” the 54-year-old union official, from Beverley, said.

But they found no survivors, only more bodies.

After 20 years with International Rescue, during which he has searched through the rubble in earthquakes all over the world, Ray has seen plenty of dead bodies. In a way, you become used to it.

Yes, it is upsetting.

“But you’ve always got to hope you’re going to find survivors,” he says. “The hardest part is coming out and saying to the people standing around ‘sorry, sorry, we haven’t found anyone’. There are always people standing around the ruined buildings, and once you turn up with Search & Rescue on your back, they always think you’re going to find something.”

Even when you don’t find survivors, locating and identifying bodies in the rubble gives desperate relatives some kind of closure. “At least we have given them the knowledge their loved one is there.”

Sometimes, just sometimes, International Rescue volunteers do find people who have managed, against all the odds, to stay alive.

York NHS manager Julie Ryan was, with Ray Gray, part of the International Rescue team that flew out to Pakistan in 2005 following a devastating earthquake.

The 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck just before 9am Pakistan time, devastating parts of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and mountainous areas of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.

The official death toll was later put at almost 80,000, although Julie and her colleagues didn’t know that at the time.

With the help of UN Land Rovers and, later, helicopters, she and her fellow International Rescue volunteers were the first outside rescue teams to reach some of the more isolated mountain towns and villages.

In one, there was a school which had completely collapsed, recalls Julie, a 42-year-old health service manager, who works at Clifton Moor and is also International Rescue’s press officer. “We quickly found several bodies, one a school teacher who still had his pen in his hand in the rubble.”

The school’s head was standing beside the collapsed building, the school register in his hand. “He had 700 pupils in the school, and he could only account for 200.”

Julie and her colleagues were airlifted by helicopter to a number of mountain villages, to assess the needs of survivors. Everywhere the story was the same: shattered buildings, scores of dead and injured, no food, no shelter, no water.

And everywhere, desperate survivors saying ‘can you help us?’ They found one elderly man whose leg had been shattered. He was in agony. The team were equipped only for needs assessment. Against all their unwritten rules, they gave him some of their own supply of painkillers. “The relief on his face…” Julie recalls.

Eventually, several days after the earthquake had struck, they landed at another small mountain village, Kahori.

They were immediately surrounded by desperate people, but this time there was hope. “We’ve heard voices! We’ve heard voices!” the people were saying.

They were taken to a three-storey school building, which had collapsed in on itself. Locals had been trying to clear the rubble away, and had created a partial tunnel.

Julie and her fellow rescuers crawled in. “I remember shouting ‘hello’,” she says. “And I got a ‘hello’ back.” She pauses, remembering. “It had never happened before.”

Ray Gray, who was in charge, organised the team into 20-minute shifts to tunnel through the rubble towards the voices. Normal practice would have been to prop up the tunnel as they went, but there was so much rubble underneath it would have taken an hour or more just to reach the floor to get a solid prop in.

The team pressed on, while the building shifted and moved around them. They were hampered by a lack of cutting equipment – they had been on a needs assessment mission only, so were poorly equipped.

Eventually, deep in the heart of the ruined building, lying flat on a bed sheltered by an angle of collapsed wall, they found three boys. One was dead, but two were alive.

The younger boy was a 14-year-old called Imran; the older, a 16-year-old, Maqbool. They got the two boys to wriggle towards them and managed to haul them out. Both were dehydrated and traumatised, especially Maqbool. “He was covered with blood when we got him out,” Julie says. “But it wasn’t his blood. It was blood from his brother, who had been lying next to him, and died.”

There have been times, Julie admits, when she has been traumatised by what she has seen and done. But when you save someone… “Finding those two boys… I can’t describe what it was like,” she says.


Becoming a volunteer with International Rescue

BEING an International Rescue volunteer can take over your life, admits Julie Ryan, a former Army nurse who became an operating theatre technician and is now a health service manager.

But you don’t need formal qualifications to become an International Rescue volunteer. If you are accepted, you have three years of gruelling training, all in your own time and involving at least a full weekend every month, before you will be qualified to go on international operations.

Even then, there are regular training sessions on the latest search and rescue techniques, and on the logistics of mounting a rescue operation on foreign soil and in hugely difficult conditions.

Most of the training is done at the International Rescue Operations Centre at Hawkhills, near Easingwold.

Training covers everything from night searches and the use of thermal imaging and fibre-optic probes to search through rubble, to tunnelling, digging and cutting, equipment training and fieldwork.

Often, training exercises will be conducted with other agencies who have specialist skills such as helicopter deployment, boat handling and mines rescue.

In his 20 years with the corps, Ray Gray has travelled all over the world to earthquakes, floods, mudslides and other disasters, to search for survivors.

His first mission was to Rwanda in 1995. Ray, who lives near Beverley with his partner, Sally, and is a Unison regional officer, was part of a small International Rescue team providing logistics support to a UN relief team at a refugee camp in Bukavu, just over the border from Rwanda.

Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been slaughtered by Hutu tribesmen. Ray didn’t see much violence first-hand, but he did see its effects. Dead and injured bodies, starvation and desperation. It still gives him nightmares, he admits.

He remembers hundreds of bodies having to be buried in a big hole, shoved in by bulldozer.

“Your heart told you it was wrong, but your head told you it was the only way to stop disease,” he says.

The experience left him shaken. “It is one of the few jobs that still gives me nightmares. I couldn’t believe that people could do to each other what they were doing to each other.”

But, despite the grim sights, the danger, the countless dead bodies, he has never regretted being a volunteer.

Many people, when they sit watching a disaster unfold on the TV news, can only wish they could so something, Ray says.

“I’m part of a group that can do something.”

But it is more than that. Shared danger and hardship brings a companionship that is close to a feeling of family, he says.

His own son died a few years ago. He was on his own at the time. “Two of my team moved in with me for two weeks. It becomes like a huge family.”

The International Rescue Corps is a UK charity and an independent, UN-registered search-and-rescue service which responds, free of charge, to disasters in the UK and around the world. Formed in 1981 following the Italian earthquake, Julie Ryan says its first president was Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson. “So there is a Thunderbirds link.”

• To find out more, visit intrescue.org or phone 01324 665011.