3 ms·

To be coldly analytical about this: how many people discovered in rubble are successfully rescued? It makes for good TV, but finding those people, orchestrating

To be coldly analytical about this: how many people discovered in rubble are successfully rescued? It makes for good TV, but finding those people, orchestrating the movement of debris, while person is potentially injured, all given the context of a wide-spread disaster seems low odds. When the Surfside condominium collapsed in Miami (a very localized calamity), did rescuers have a genuine belief that anyone trapped underneath could still be alive and saved? From my armchair, it seemed foregone conclusion that there were going to be no survivors. Seems much better to have a contingent of drones which can quickly canvas an area and locate survivors visibly trapped or otherwise requiring assistance on the surface. Edit: Wiki page on the Surfside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse Apparently four people were extracted, and three of them survived

MattGaiser 3y ago
Four people were recovered from the rubble alive (one later died) in Surfside, so that wasn’t the conclusion at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
julianeon 3y ago
To be coldly analytical in response: Surfside is a bad example. You're right that it wouldn't matter there, but that's not the use case. On the national level, because there are few dire incidents in an affluent peaceful nation, there may not be much use for this in, say, the USA. You can solve most of its emergency problems with raw manpower and there aren't many resource constraints. It's real use case is international, especially in times and places of war. I can pick two out of the news right now - Ukraine, Palestine - and say it would be helpful there. But even if those wars ended, we can be certain new ones will crop up with similar conditions, where it could also be used. There will always be places, internationally, where buildings are collapsing and resources for rescue are scant to nonexistent.
u32480932048 3y ago
In the US at least, there's typically a presumption of survivors. One benefit to this is it provides "real-world" training (even if everyone's dead) - collapsed buildings are especially difficult/expensive to simulate. Rescuer safety is the major variable in deciding how much time and effort to put in. So you'll see searches continue for an "unreasonable" period of time, both because people seem to survive in unreasonable circumstances and also because you've already got everyone out there - but once the weather turns bad, they'll usually start scaling it back or call it off (unless there's high confidence that something specific needs to happen in a specific area). USAR teams have a variety of listening equipment to attempt to localize victims in a collapsed building, and while that ability could definitely be improved, I'm very skeptical that sending in a bunch of cockroaches to crawl all over people pinned in rubble is the best we can come up with.

MattGaiser 3y ago

Four people were recovered from the rubble alive (one later died) in Surfside, so that wasn’t the conclusion at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

julianeon 3y ago

To be coldly analytical in response: Surfside is a bad example. You're right that it wouldn't matter there, but that's not the use case. On the national level, because there are few dire incidents in an affluent peaceful nation, there may not be much use for this in, say, the USA. You can solve most of its emergency problems with raw manpower and there aren't many resource constraints. It's real use case is international, especially in times and places of war. I can pick two out of the news right now - Ukraine, Palestine - and say it would be helpful there. But even if those wars ended, we can be certain new ones will crop up with similar conditions, where it could also be used. There will always be places, internationally, where buildings are collapsing and resources for rescue are scant to nonexistent.

u32480932048 3y ago

In the US at least, there's typically a presumption of survivors. One benefit to this is it provides "real-world" training (even if everyone's dead) - collapsed buildings are especially difficult/expensive to simulate. Rescuer safety is the major variable in deciding how much time and effort to put in. So you'll see searches continue for an "unreasonable" period of time, both because people seem to survive in unreasonable circumstances and also because you've already got everyone out there - but once the weather turns bad, they'll usually start scaling it back or call it off (unless there's high confidence that something specific needs to happen in a specific area). USAR teams have a variety of listening equipment to attempt to localize victims in a collapsed building, and while that ability could definitely be improved, I'm very skeptical that sending in a bunch of cockroaches to crawl all over people pinned in rubble is the best we can come up with.