By Guy McCarthy
City News Service
LOS ANGELES — A plan to send to more than 70 members of a highly-trained urban search-and-rescue team to earthquake-ravaged Chile was canceled Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
“There’s a staffing plan and they were cancelled,” county Fire Dispatch Supervisor Robert Diaz said tonight. “They were de-mobilized at three this afternoon.”
Formally known as the Los Angeles County Fire Department “Heavy Rescue Task Force,” the team had assembled Monday for deployment to Chile with a contingent of 74 members.
Team members had scrambled Monday and were ready then to fly to Chile, when a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Saturday.
However, they were sent home because there was no plane and remained on standby until this afternoon, according to fire department officials.
The Los Angeles County team includes firefighters, rescue paramedics, emergency room doctors, structural engineers, heavy equipment specialists, search dogs and their handlers, hazardous materials technicians, and communications and logistics staff, according to county fire officials.
The team also travels with 55,000 pounds of pre-packaged gear that allows them to work around-the-clock in disaster areas.
The team’s supervisors had received a request Monday morning from the U.S. Agency for International Development Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, and team members staged at a county facility on Osborne Street in Pacoima, said Los Angeles County Fire Department Inspector Matt Levesque.
Recent experience shows the “hurry-up-and-wait” timing of search-and- rescue deployments is subject to at least two key variables — international diplomacy and U.S. military air traffic planning.
Sometimes planning works and sometimes it doesn’t. Less than two months ago, a Los Angeles County team deployed to Haiti caught a flight within 48 hours of the catastrophic earthquake, but an Orange County team staged and waited days for a flight that never materialized.
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