An Israeli rescue team that supported recovery efforts after a devastating earthquake in Bangkok included a young Thai-Israeli officer whose life was brought full circle by the disaster.
On 28 March, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake rocked Myanmar, south-west China and Thailand. While the destruction centred on Myanmar, the quake also destroyed an unfinished 30-storey skyscraper in Bangkok intended for the State Audit Office.
Lieutenant R was born in Bangkok to a Thai mother and Israeli father. Her family moved to the US when she was 11, and at 18 she made aliyah. Her military service saw her join the Israel Defence Force’s Rescue Brigade, whose day-to-day role is saving people from damaged or collapsed buildings following a missile strike.
“I was extremely upset when I heard about all the deaths in the city that I grew up in,” she told the JC. “But then I realised: ‘Wait, I'm in a brigade where all we do is rescue people who fall from buildings.’”
The official death toll from the earthquake rose to 3,564 on Monday. (IDF)[Missing Credit]
Lt R was part of a wider team of engineers, data intelligence experts and mathematicians who remotely assisted the Thai rescue mission from Israel. She described having a “gut feeling” that she had to be part of the mission. “It’s a crazy experience to do aliyah from a certain country, to be in the army in another country, just to help back home. It’s a great feeling.”
Following the earthquake, a team of 22 Israeli experts including engineers, doctors and rescue professionals was dispatched to Bangkok. The team, led by Colonel Yossi Pinto, the commander of the IDF’s reserve national Search and Rescue Unit, flew from Ben-Gurion International Airport two days after the quake.
Lt R was part of a remote support team which built an “intelligence picture” of the collapsed building from afar to guide the Thai and Israeli rescuers on the ground. She said Israel is one of the only countries in the world that uses this particular, advanced method of information-gathering in the aftermath of a crisis, based on behavioural and population intelligence.
A team of 22 Israeli experts landed in Bangkok to “build an intelligence picture” of the crisis. (IDF)[Missing Credit]
It was Lt R’s job to source as much information as possible about the location of the construction workers before the collapse. Using her proficiency in Thai, she was able to track down intelligence about the victims moments before the collapse, building a “story-line” of their movements. “It’s a lot of brain work,” she said.
A team of digital engineers and mathematicians then built a 3D digital map of the scene, which they fed to the rescue team. The technique meant that rescue workers were making informed decisions rather than just “searching blindly in the rubble,” Lt R said. “When we're dealing with casualties, we're racing against the clock. We don't have time to talk about it.”
With this assistance, the Thai rescue team was able to save between 15-20 people from the rubble, Lieutenant R said. Sniffer dogs and thermal imaging drones were also deployed to search for signs of life following the collapse, close to the popular tourist destination Chatuchak market.
The earthquake, centred just outside Myanmar’s second city Mandalay, was the country’s most powerful in more than a century, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Rescue efforts in Myanmar have been hampered by the ongoing civil war; on Monday, state media said more than 3,500 people had been killed.
