Israeli military search team helped recover majority of Surfside victims | Hacker News Reader

Israeli military search team helped recover majority of Surfside victims

palmbeachpost.com

271 points737min131 comments

https://twitter.com/MiamiDadeFire/status/1414340434814513156

Here's the tribute Miami-Date Fire Rescue gave their plane before it took off.

>Israeli team has fewer members so they learn to be 'small and swift'

It is amazing to see how they work to save those people, at the same time terrifying to think how they got those experience with all those never ending wars throughout their lifetime.

Salut to the team for helping those in grief.

Also from wikipedia: >Distinct from possible construction defects, an analysis of European Remote-Sensing Satellite data by Florida International University indicates that the building had been sinking during the 1990s at a significant rate of about two millimeters (0.079 in) per year. While 97 percent of Miami Beach had been stable, 1,555 of 18,949 points in Miami Beach had been sinking, at a rate of less than one millimeter (0.039 in) per year.

This is actually terrifying to hear

So about 2 inches. Is that enough to cause a collapse? I don't know enough to answer this question, but I would hope that buildings are engineered to handle at least a couple inches of sinking. My house in the hills has 2-3 inch variations after 70 years of existence, but admittedly it's not a high rise building.

It may have contributed to it but in this case the bigger problem was an error in the construction of the building:

> In 2018, an inspection performed by the engineering firm Morabito Consultants showed a "major error" in the construction of the pool deck, whereby the waterproofing layer was not sloped. Water that collected on the waterproofing remained until it could evaporate. Over the years, the concrete slabs below the pool deck had been severely damaged by this water. The report noted the waterproofing below the pool deck was beyond its useful life and needed to be completely removed and replaced.

> On June 30, WLS-TV in Chicago publicized a bystander's video of water pouring into the parking garage from above near its entrance, and apparent concrete rubble lying on the floor, apparently taken at 1:18 a.m., seven minutes before the north-central portion of the building collapsed.

From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse#...

Wow that video is crazy

https://abc7chicago.com/florida-collapse-video-miami-condo-t...

If the whole building sank that much there might have also been bigger variations.

Even at first thought, it makes sense why the IDF would be well equipped for such a mission, given all the turmoil in the Middle East(mentioned in the article), they have much more experience in this situation. I can't imagine all the horror that those volunteers may have seen through their lifetimes, and they find a way to use that experience to help others thousands of miles away.

I can imagine that for a typical volunteer, pulling body parts out of rubble would be a fairly life changing event, and the number of people in the world with the experience and grit to tackle this gracefully can't be a long list.

>Even at first thought, it makes sense why the IDF would be well equipped for such a mission, given all the turmoil in the Middle East(mentioned in the article), they have much more experience in this situation.

Actually they don't really have similar "field experience" from Israel (fortunately). They do have a bunch of training with artificially made piles of rubbles and whenever something happens somewhere in the world (earthquakes, tsunamis, etc) they usually among first to arrive.

Watching and reading about the teams arriving in Christchurch, New Zealand after the earthquake that happened there was really impressive and inspiring.

Countries that seemed far away and uninvolved had teams touching down at staggered intervals and brought resources and skill that really helped.

International search and rescue seems to be a little world of its own that operates away from the noise and bickering of ‘normal’ international relations.

These are amongst the few bonding experiences in today's world, like the Thai cave rescues.

Because everyone benefits. The helpers get first hand experience, the helped get rapid scaleup of capabilities. Nobody’s interested in messing this up as everybody knows they might be next. This is the sort of positive feedback that keeps the world turning.

NZ's SAR teams (primarily urban SAR) have repeatedly deployed overseas to assist after a natural disaster, same with our Police DVI (disaster victim identification) teams - most prominently after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

There's a lot of solidarity between countries on the Ring of Fire when it comes to natural disasters. We even had the Californians turn up alongside the other countries.

Likewise, rural firefighters from NZ, Australia and California routinely travel to each other's countries when backup is needed.

It's the implicit reciprocity, and real life training opportunities that drive it. Otherwise your training is all stimulated, like covering a bunch of mannequins in sheep offal...

https://www.police.govt.nz/news/ten-one-magazine/dvi-trainin...

Reminds me of flight MH 370 although unfortunately the plane was ultimately not found.

It's more than that. Part of it is army training, but a giant part of it is organizations like ZAKA (https://zakaworld.org/) whose mission comes from our core religious beliefs. As Jews, we're ideally buried fully - meaning as many body parts, blood, whatever intact, or at least with the body. In situations where disasters occur, ZAKA helps triage, recover, identify, and even do DNA analysis as needed, to help make this happen. This is in addition to training our security services.

In Israel, regardless of political affiliation, religious beliefs or anything else, they're understood to be the true heroes that they are. No one else exhaustively pursues these events to conclusion. There's a reason that their mantra is חסד של אמת, which is best translated as true lovingkindness. Yes, in Hebrew lovingkindess is a concept that is different than "loving kindness".

With all respect to ZAKA, and I have a lot, they don't really have much to do with this unit. This unit is search and rescue (if possible). Zaka is "body (parts) collection"

Since when has ZAKA not trained with, and trained search and rescue? After basic, and initials there's are courses with ZAKA. ZAKA wasn't the provider of service, just of training.

Maybe they occasionally do operation training together in order to know how to work together at crisis, but it's first time that I hear that zaka trains IDF search&rescue. I googled for it, and the only thing that I found is that IDF trained zaka people.

גם וגם

> There's a reason that their mantra is חסד של אמת

It's simpler than you're making it out to be - "ḥesed shel emet" (true kindness) is based on the Talmudic idea that the truest kindness is that done for the dead, since they can't ever pay you back.

Also ZAKA is not related to the IDF or this mission.

Of course - you cannot bury yourself. But, I'd argue that it's not the kindness translation of חסר but lovingkindness, more ברסלבish

> Yes, in Hebrew lovingkindess is a concept that is different than "loving kindness".

What's the difference?

Also, lovingkindness is an English word , not Hebrew. Chesed shel emet is three Hebrew words.

Yes, this is easily splitting Talmudic hairs. In English lovingkindness is really loving-kindness, a form of kindness that is done from the place of love. But lovingkindness is the notion that love and kindness have equal weight.

> at first thought, it makes sense why the IDF would be well equipped for such a mission

It almost always takes a nation (Like IDF) to collapse a building. Second thought would be they have no direct experience.

They are however prepared. And like most altruistic.

This is suprisingly interesting. They use a 3D model to geographically identify each sub-unit of the original building in the rubbles. Then they gather intelligence on clues in each unit to confirm their data and adjust their model accordingly. Doing this they are able to improve precision and identify smaller units in the rubbles (ex. identify each room within a house).

It's really an intelligence unit with the added capacity of excavating and moving rubble. I can see the usefulness of this for an army. Buildings, especially buildings targeted during conflicts, contain precious and strategical objects and information. Being able to recover them is crucial.

They are part of the army, but it's part that is called Homefront Command that is tasked with civil defense: preparing the population for a conflict or disaster, assisting the population during the crisis, and contributing to post-crisis reconstruction. It mostly focuses on civilians and infrastructure.

Bless this team. In my life, I've realised (via harsh experience) how necessary a body is for healthy human grieving.

I'm not entirely sure why, my gut feeling is that it's something primitive in the human animal, but I've witnessed it enough to respect the effort SAR teams put into body recovery.

Absolutely incredible. At first, I was skeptical and even wondering why an IDF group was there, but now I'm in absolute awe of the abilities of disciplined, well trained groups.

> This is it. There will be no more than 98 or 99. Not a single one more.

Precision of a surgeon or sniper with first principles first. Initially, it would seem like a waste to do this work, but it clearly helped.

It would be great if IDF did the same when it comes to Gaza:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/27/gaza-apparent-war-crimes...

IDF offered help recently to Lebanon during the crisis. Lebanon refused.

You can guess how the response of Gaza will look like...

Don't they do everything to avoid hitting civilians? My guess is that they do more to protect the average palestinian than meets the eye....definitely more than Hamas or Fatah

Also, I'd take HRW with a grain of salt when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even their founder has expressed concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watc....

Might be interesting: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/palestinians-accuse-hamas-...

Is Amnesty also biased?

https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-a...

I don't know as much about them, sorry. Quick Google search showed that there has been some claims of selection bias and "not telling the full story". My take is that they're doing a disservice to both sides.

I just glanced it.

Yes. Bias here. Whoever wrote this has not been reading history closely enough.

I will continue to support Amnesty though. One of the better ones IMO, together with MSF.

I'm not sure you can simulataneously accuse hrw of bias (wrt isreal-palestine conflict), but also link to the jerusalem post

Washington Post better? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/3...

They've been doing it for years. The odd ones are the one's who aren't reporting it.

The Wikipedia is a case of whataboutism. And a complaint of how difficult it is to influence HRW by government, leaders and special interest groups.

The fact that you linked to a jpost article and shined light on the little israel does to “save” lives after literally bombarding them tells me where you stand in relation to the conflict.

By "don't they do everything to avoid hitting civilians" do you mean the warning phone calls? They don't make such calls when their aim is to assassinate someone - for obvious reasons.. The IDF also has good information on who lives where - that's how they know where to bomb - so they know that many children will be killed/murdered - as they often are.. The aim is killing some terrorist leader - which is arguably rather dubious given that they'll soon be replaced and the additional hatred will help greatly with terroist recruitment..

e.g. see https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/gaza-israel-wiping-entir...

I love this very methodical, Sherlock Holmes style of investigating. It clearly worked too. They found 84% of the 100 victims.

"Nearly 100"; the use of statistics in the article is jarring. Also, the explanation of the Israeli's methodology is lacking; the cropped screenshots are not very helpful in determining what the software can do. How does it map the "voids" to the previous structure? The map creation is certainly a probabilistic process. So, what expectation thresholds are being used? No names for the "2-D and 3-D" software. What is sorely missing is any references. Only can assume the software is all in house to the IDF.

did you even read the article? it goes somewhat deep into how they plan and orchestrate it, especially for a normal publication

Yes, I did read the article, and have listed details it would benefit from to allow further investigation.

The key insights seem to be:

1) Despite the chaos, the debris of a collapsed building can be mapped to the structure as it was when standing.

2) All sorts of information can be used in figuring out where you are - the breed of a dog corpse, a scrap of paper with the name of a victim's rabbi...

3) Be skeptical of secondary sources (estimates of the number of victims...)

4) Bureaucrats will be obstructive just by doing their job as if nothing has happened (we can't tell you that...)

One thing that was not mentioned, but which I imagine was part of the calculus, is what people are likely to do at the first sign of trouble (in this case, noise and shaking) - head for the stairs, go to the window, wait for it to stop...

The part about how quickly they figured out the number of missing was actually 97-99, opposed to the "official" number ~150, was really impressive.

Of all the things the article covers, I'm most interested to know more about how they interview friends and family so quickly and efficiently, when things are still so raw and emotional. It does say that half the team is dedicated to that task, at least initially.

> scrap of paper with the name of a victim's rabbi...

I can definitely see this as plausible.

> They found 84% of the 100 victims.

The chilling and sad realization that it wasn't "They found 84 out of 100 victims"

They say 81 victims out of 97. You're overthinking it.

ETA: 81, not 80.

>he knew precisely where each victim would be located.

>He personally found 20. His team, he said, recovered 81 by the time the last member departed Surfside on July 11.

Even the freaking byline reads:

>The Israeli Defense Forces’ National Rescue Unit recovered 81 of the 97 victims from the Champlain Towers South condo collapse site in Surfside.

The quote is 'In all, the Israeli team found about 84% of the nearly 100 victims.' and the realization that they might mean that they found 84% of the body parts vs 84% of the people.

That would mean they would have to know the exact body mass of the 100 victims prior to their death and weighed each recovered piece of flesh. That's morbid and really just overthinking it.

1. I was just pointing out thats where the OP mind could wander to, especially within the context of the story.

2. The irony is that you are the one overthinking by going as far as to suggest weighing flesh. One can recover a body from the waist up and consider it 50%.

why are the IDF there?

because they volunteered and the Miami emergency response was willing to accept their help. They were then authorized to participate in the operations. The article lists many other countries this unit has also volunteered to help.

Miami has many Israeli expats, this building specifically had many dual Israeli-American citizens and the family and friends of the victims called for the IDF to come help, the governor, and mayor ok-ed it so they came.

Many countries have disaster recovery teams specifically tasked with assisting in international catastrophes, the Israeli one happens to be a division of the IDF, probably for budgetary reasons.

It makes sense why it would be part of the IDF. In Israel, the usual reason you need disaster response is an act of terrorism. Having the disaster recovery and security forces all under a single authority makes coordinating a response much easier.

> the Israeli one happens to be a division of the IDF, probably for budgetary reasons.

Given that Israel has mandatory military service, it may have something to do with allowing that service to count.

I think its fairly common to have disaster recovery as part of the military, and to have them help in foreign countries when disaster strikes. E.g. canadian military helped out in usa during hurricane katrina

It sounds like a great real life training opportunity for a rescue unit, it seems like it would be hard to develop fake training exercises to simulate the challenges of a real collapse of a big building.

I think it's standard practice for one's military to help another country for example the Mexican military came to America to help during Hurricane Katrina. The military is prepared for all kinds of situations so they are probably the best government agency to help.

Very interesting! Does anyone have more information on how they were selected? It's not exactly a local operation.

A bunch of missing residents belonged to the same synagogue. The IDF unit was one of several international search and rescue teams to volunteer.

Yes, but how were they selected?

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