Herefordshire medic awed by scale of earthquake destruction

Dr Malcolm Russell is medical director of UK International Search and Rescue

The medical director of a search and rescue team says he has never seen anything on the scale of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.

Dr Malcolm Russell, from Herefordshire, went to the region with UK International Search and Rescue after the quakes on 6 February.

While there, the team rescued 11 people, including a man buried under rubble for five days.

"The scale of this was just incredibly vast," he said.

"The expression 'it was like a disaster movie' - no disaster movie would ever compete with the reality of what we saw."

He explained: "We train on certain collapsed building structures and it was like that but then another thousand-fold, the whole city was in devastation."

The 6 February quakes killed 44,000 people in Turkey and Syria and were followed by further tremors. Another earthquake in Turkey this week killed at least six people.

Dr Russell has been to other quake zones on rescue missions including Christchurch, New Zealand, and Japan, both in 2011.

"The TV pictures just do not do it justice," he said.

"Collapsed buildings, one after the other across an entire city, sirens going literally 24/7, fires burning, dust everywhere."

Dr Russell said no disaster movie could compare to the devastation he saw with his team after the deadly earthquakes

As well as helping the man from the rubble, the team also rescued a man and a woman from a collapsed hotel.

"The lady came out first, the gentleman had a beam across his legs and we had to spend about five hours breaking it up to release him," Dr Russell said.

"A huge team effort, everyone was working flat out."

One of the people rescued by the team has since contacted Dr Russell on Twitter to thank him.

"It's great to have a message like that but we don't see it in those terms of heroics," he told BBC Breakfast, having returned to the UK.

"We are a professional organisation, we train for this, we choose to work in that environment."

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