Three people from our Robotics Dept. at the University (Jens, Tom and myself) were volunteers to become members of the THW (Technisches Hilfswerk, the governmental disaster relief organisation in Germany), more specifically, within the SEEBA group (Rapid Deployment Unit for Search and Rescue) during a deployment exercise.
The exercise consisted of an scenario where an earthquake had just made collapse some buildings and the units had to work searching for trapped people. Our task was to test the capabilities of our walking robot in these scenarios.
Location: surroundings of Geneva, Switzerland
Here we are (Tom and me) on the way to Geneva. After a normal working Monday, we took the bus around 1 a.m. During the trip we would pick up different members of the Unit.Here we were still happy...and ignorants about what was waiting for us in Geneva......
After travelling the whole night, we arrived at Geneva Airport at around 3 p.m. next day.
There, our first task: unload all these heeavy boxes with our material from this truck and load them into smaller military trucks to access the "disaster area".
While we arrived on a bus..... the Swiss Units used helicopters...
There have been always classes...
The Unit was split into two groups. The first group went directly to the earthquake zone to evaluate the situation. The second (including us) were sent to establish our base camp. That means, built our tents.
More specifically, while the rest of the group built different "facility" tents (showers, kitchen, offices, medical service, dining tent, etc...) we three were told to build the tents where we slept.Eight huge tents; 45min time to build each.
That makes, if i am not wrong, like 6 hours... and we began around 5 p.m....
So by midnight we were finally ready to go to sleep.... well....after such a long journey and day of work... eat something and then go to sleep. And that's what we did.
But.....15 min after getting into our sleeping bags...we get an order from the outside: "Einsatz!". So, we had to get up and be ready to go to the earthquake zone in 15 min. The other unit just arrived and we were part of the replacement unit....
So... there we are: 1 a.m., 24hours since we started our trip.
In theory we were observers..but... that was beginning to look like something else. After arrival, we got our instructions: get into a collapse building, dragging our bodies over the ground, in darkness, till the basement. There, two guys were trying to drill a 30cm concrete wall to rescue a victim. Our mission: help them in turns with the f* heavy drilling machine.
At 6 a.m. our replacement unit came and we finally were able to get some sleep (not much, at 12 a.m we were up and having lunch to go again to the earthquake area).
Here , the members of the "Bremen Commando" ready to take off to the disaster area.
A view of one of the disaster areas
A victim was trapped at the end of this rubble and we were there...
These guys had sophisticated weapons.....
Again, we were told to drill.......
Some facilities....
The dining room...
The kitchen..
oh, God! I needed that nap ...
A view of the service area: showers, dining tent, kitchen, etc....
And after 3 days of hard working, lack of sleep and... no shower till last afternoon... we were invited to a farewell dinner with the two units that took part on this exercise.
The blue soldiers are from the German Units... the orange ones from the Swiss ...
And after some sleep..next day the opposite operation: disassemble the tents...load the truck and 12 hours bus back to Bremen.
As a conclusion, it was an unexpected trip, since we thought we were testing there our robot....but we finally worked as anyone else there. Really nice and interesting experience, though
(despite needing 20 hours sleep to recover from these days)
