“The ground shook, my daddy went . . . My dad’s a hero. Haiti 2010.”

Heroes heeded call to work in Haiti
By Sharon Rice
The Friday Flyer Editor

 

Left L.A. County Firefighters Ron Horetski, at top left, with his black Lab search dog, Pearl, and Lewis Francescon, standing in front of a collapsed building in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. As members of the California Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 2 (CA-TF2), the Canyon Lake residents recently returned from a two-week mission to Haiti. Ron and his canine search team are pictured prior to deploying from Pacoima. Lewis and his team are pictured in front of the collapsed National Palace in Port-au-Prince. Dogs searched for the scent of live human beings under the rubble and alerted their handlers. Rescuers worked under treacherous conditions to aid and rescue survivors.

These photographs reveal the treacherous conditions under which CA-TF2 members sometimes worked to rescue people from beneath several stories of collapsed buildings. Specially trained to enter constrained spaces and administer IVs, the rescuer's boots seen above demonstrate just how far dedicated volunteers like Lewis will go to save lives.

      
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By now, most people have seen or read the statistics for the 7.0 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12 and killed more than 200,000 people. But Fire Captain Ron Horetski and Paramedic Lewis Francescon, both of Canyon Lake, saw the devastation firsthand when they were deployed with the Los Angeles County Fire Department Urban Search and Rescue Task Force on January 13. The 72-member team returned to a heroes’ welcome on January 27.
     During those 15 days, 13 of them spent in rescue operations, the Canyon Lakers experienced the sights, sounds and smells of death and destruction Ron described as “overwhelming,” the worst he had ever seen.
     Even though they don’t know each other, the men are members of Urban Search and Rescue California Task Force 2 or CA-TF2, a FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force based in Los Angeles and sponsored by the Los Angeles County Fire Department. CA-TF2 is one of two task forces that works with the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA) to provide international response to natural and man-made disasters. (Task Force 1 is based in Fairfax, Virginia, and also went to Haiti).
     CA-TF2 is comprised of Los Angeles County Fire Department firefighters and paramedic rescue specialists, emergency room physicians, structural engineers, heavy equipment specialists, canine search dogs and handlers, hazardous materials technicians and communications and logistics specialists.
     Ron is a handler for a dog trained in finding live human scent in collapsed buildings. Lewis is trained in confined space rescue. Both specialties require extensive training and certification. Both contributed to the LA team’s rescue of nine people trapped in the Port-au-Prince rubble.
     Alerted to meet at a facility in Pacoima immediately following the Haiti earthquake, Ron and Lewis and their teammates were bused to March Air Reserve Base and transported to Haiti aboard a C-17 Globemaster out of Travis AFB. They arrived in Haiti at 6 a.m. January 14 and immediately went to work.
     In the early hours of the search and rescue efforts, before aerial photographs could help logistics personnel map out an organized grid, Ron says his team’s first destination was a collapsed hotel. After that, they drove through the streets and stopped wherever they saw people digging in the rubble, knowing if their dogs picked up a scent that was the place to spend their efforts.
     The task force’s specialized canine team consisted of six live scent dogs and six handlers, divided into a red team and blue team. Within hours, Ron’s red team was assigned to an eight-block area and, later, an outlying suburb. Lewis’ team was sent to the areas where live bodies were discovered.
     When they weren’t involved in search and rescue, the LA task force lived in tents on the U.S. embassy grounds, guarded by U.N. troops. They had brought with them 48 tons of specialty equipment, tools, food and water.
     Ron’s primary tool, of course, was his dog – a black Labrador named Pearl, also known as “Black Pearl,” which lives with him at his home in Canyon Lake. Like the other canines, Pearl was trained by the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, based in Central California. She passed her FEMA test in May 2009. The handlers and their dogs train weekly on their own time wherever rubble is available throughout the Southland. “We bury ourselves,” says Ron.
     The dogs can smell live humans trapped three to 10 feet underground and are trained to bark when they find someone. Ron recalls several of the rescues, one of them filmed by CNN. In that one, a woman was rescued from a 14-inch void under three stories of collapsed concrete that had once been her office building.
     Whenever a person was discovered alive, the rescuers’ first job was to get water to him or her. In one instance, Ron recalls the team setting up a PVC pipe to drip bottled water into a person’s mouth. If possible, a paramedic would crawl into the tight space and provide intravenous fluid. This was what Lewis was trained to do. After that, the extraction began.
     Both men have stories to tell of rescues that filled them with elation. Unfortunately, they pulled more cadavers than live bodies from the rubble.
     By the 14th day, the Haitian government called an end to the official search and rescue operations, though Ron and Lewis’ team had been prepared to stay there for 30 days if necessary. In all, the American teams had rescued 45 people.
     Ron says when the team first started its operation he and the others were met with suspicion by the Haitians. It had been more than a century since an earthquake had struck the country, so some people didn’t know what had happened. One Haitian told him a bomb had gone off in his building. Ron learned others also thought there had been a bomb explosion and they fretted the Americans were involved in a military operation.
     It wasn’t until the firefighters explained who they were and invited the citizens to help them dig that they received their cooperation.
     This was the first international mission the California Task Force had been on and, in spite of the death and destruction, looting and lawlessness, heat and humidity, Ron says he would go back in a heartbeat.
     He has been a firefighter 21 years. When he isn’t training with Pearl, he takes his other dog, Fritzie, a German Shepherd, to do search and rescue with the Search Dogs of Riverside County. Ron has been a Canyon Lake resident since 1992.
     Lewis has been with the LA County Fire Department 17 years, 15 of them as a paramedic. He has been training for search and rescue work for eight years. A year ago, he and another paramedic were sent to Florida by LA County Fire for special training that prepared them to work in confined spaces. Lewis lives in Canyon Lake with his wife, Kim, and three children, 10, 8 and 5. Both of the Canyon Lakers also worked in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
     After their trip to Haiti, CA-TF2 arrived home to a heroes’ welcome by their families and friends. Officials praised the team’s efforts and thanked the families who let them go. Like the other rescuers’ kids, Lewis children wore T-shirts that said, “The ground shook, the people called, my daddy went . . . My dad’s a hero. Haiti 2010.”

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