The Taipei City Fire Department yesterday hosted an international search-and-rescue exchange, bringing together disaster relief experts from Taiwan, Japan and South Korea to share their know-how and experience to improve response efforts.
Huang Chien-hua (黃建華), head of the department’s disaster and rescue division, said the Hualien County search-and-rescue team, which spearheaded rescue efforts in the aftermath of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake on Feb. 6, was invited to the forum to outline their approach.
The rescuers discussed how they used the media and social media to release information about suspected missing persons confirm their whereabouts, Huang said.
They then used that information along with police resources and household registration data to determine who might have been trapped in the rubble.
In a statement to the media on Feb. 9, the National Police Agency called the method a tech-based approach, similar to that used in criminal investigations.
The method allowed police to reduce the number of suspected missing people from 183 to seven in just 60 hours following the earthquake.
Experts from Japan discussed their relief efforts in the wake of the Great Hanshin earthquake on Jan. 17, 1995 and the Tohoku earthquake on March 11, 2011.
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