Helicopters, all-terrain vehicles, ambulances, water treatment plants and even a relocatable hospital are part of the means deployed this week by the armed forces of Argentina and Chile, in the province of Mendoza, where they simulated responding to the various consequences of a large earthquake magnitude.
The premise of the Combined Joint Exercise “Solidarity 2022” is that in the early hours of November 1, an earthquake measuring 7.5 degrees on the Richter scale shook the capital of Mendoza and destroyed much of its infrastructure: it made the airport useless, collapsed several of the bridges over the alluvial channels that cross the urban area, trapped victims under numerous collapsed structures and caused an unknown number of drowned people, due to the flood that generated a fissure in the Potrerillos dam.
To make the scenario more complex, while the first answer already had deployed a command post Next to the headquarters of the Government and an evacuee camp in the San Martín park, a second earthquake caused heavy damage and numerous victims on Tuesday morning in a densely populated neighborhood, about 6 kilometers south of the provincial capital.
The inhabitants of the city of Mendoza and other localities followed the development of the actionsand they came to each deployment to take pictures or have their portraits taken next to the vehicles and personnel of the armed forces of Argentina and Chile, who worked with the police, firefighters and civil defense teams of the province and the municipalities.
The Minister of Defense, Jorge Taiana, together with the Undersecretary of Defense of Chile, Gabriel Gaspar, and the Chilean Ambassador to Argentina, Bárbara Figueroa, supervised the development of the exercisewhich has been held every three years since 1997 to strengthen international cooperation in humanitarian aid and coordinated work with agencies belonging to the National Civil Protection System.
the journey started in the IV Brigade of the Argentine Air Force, whose runway, shared with the provincial airport, would be inoperable due to the earthquake; there a Hercules C-130 demonstrated its ability to parachute up to 16 tons of containerized cargo.
Photos: Ramiro Gomez
When each package touched the ground, a Lama helicopter landed so that one of its crew members could release the parachute, hook the load and move it to where it was needed.
In the Potrerillos dam, Argentine and Chilean helicopters “sowed” divers in the water, near the retaining wall in which they had to evaluate the crack caused by the earthquake and that continued to flood the nearby lands, causing an unspecified number of drowned.
After the “earthquake” of November 1, one of the structures used as a refuge for evacuees was the old industrial plant of the firm Carbometal in the town of Luján de Cuyoalthough the second earthquake of the year collapsed that structure and at least twenty people remained missing under the rubble.
To give the exercise more realism, powerful loudspeakers at different points on the property reproduced the wail of sirens, cries for help, and the rumblings of several landslides, while the municipal and agency workers who participated in the drill, who were assigned the role of victims, they lay with make-up wounds and asked for help.
To rescue these “victims”, members of the brand-new USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) brigade of the Argentine armed forces and specialized Chilean military units carried out an operation on site together with civil defense personnel and Mendoza canines.
On the highest floors of the old foundry, tens of meters above the surface, firefighters and soldiers carried out different types of ropes to lower the immobilized wounded on stretchers through zip lines or catwalks; while on the surface others worked in sync to rescue victims trapped under heavy concrete slabs.
Major Juan Ceresoli of the VIII Brigade of the Argentine Army told Télam that “in these exercises what is sought is to strengthen inter-agency work, in this particular rescue event we are working with firefighters, the Red Cross, Civil Defense and there is also a canine unit supported by the provincial Ministry of Security.”
People rescued from the collapse were taken to a health camp about 200 meters from the collapsed structure.
The officials then went to the headquarters of the Mendoza Government, where the earthquake had rendered all the buildings in the area unusable, so a series of tents were set up in the adjoining park as an emergency command center with access to telecommunications, to coordinate all the actions of the different agencies that participated in the operation; there, each agency had representatives who shared information on the tasks they carry out and everything came together on screens and situation boards.
After speaking with the personnel in charge of the exercise, the Minister of Defense, Jorge Taiana, stated: “These activities are very important to prepare the armed forces, civil protection organizations and the community itself to deal in the best possible way situations that we are simulating today but of which we know that there are very concrete possibilities that happen in reality”.
“It is very gratifying to witness the coordinated work of the armed forces of Argentina and Chile together with the police, firefighters, the Red Cross, health personnel and other agencies of the provincial state, it is key to sustain these efforts in joint and combined training because we all learn a lot from each other from these exercises”, he added.
In the San Martín park in the capital of Mendoza, near the Frank Romero Day amphitheater, the “earthquake” caused a multiple collision in which a tanker truck loaded with chemical products caught fire, causing a significant toxic spill and several injured with severe burns. ; A Chemical, Bacteriological and Nuclear (QBN) protection unit of the Argentine Army was deployed there, which together with volunteer firefighters controlled the spill and evacuated the victims through ambulances and helicopters while several visitors to the park approached attracted by the suits of protection that they used and the maneuvers of the aircraft.
Nearby, the Argentine Navy had set up an evacuee accommodation center for those who lost their homes in the earthquake, together with the Red Cross and volunteers from the Boy Scouts, they received the “victims” who were registered and housed in tents.
In front of this camp, the Argentine Army set up a mobile plant capable of making 3,600 liters of water drinkable and dividing 1,500 half-liter sachets of drinking water per hour.
Also in San Martín Park, the armed forces set up a relocatable hospital that had been donated to Argentina by China during the Covid-19 pandemic and that during that emergency served the La Matanza district of Buenos Aires.
The “Solidarity 2022” exercise involved 740 members of the Argentine armed forces and nearly a hundred Chilean soldiers.
In addition to the minister Taiana; Chilean Undersecretary Gaspar and Ambassador Figueroa; The activity was accompanied by the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, Lieutenant General Juan Martín Paleo; the head of the Army, division general Guillermo Olegario Pereda; the head of the Navy, Admiral Julio Guardia; the head of the Air Force, Brigadier General Xavier Isaac; the Secretary for International Affairs of the Ministry of Defense, Francisco Cafiero; and the secretary of Strategy and Military Affairs, Sergio Rossi; among other Argentine and Chilean officials.
