LOS ANGELES — Search-and-rescue workers from Los Angeles have returned from Turkey after spending weeks assisting in the aftermath of the region’s massive earthquake, which killed tens of thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more.
More than 80 Los Angeles County Fire Department personnel were dispatched Feb. 6 as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Disaster Assistance Response Team, which included a search-and-rescue squad from Fairfax, Virginia, after the magnitude 7.8 quake that devastated Turkey and northern Syria that day.
The L.A. County and Virginia crews are the only such teams in the country that qualify under the USAID program to assist in international disaster response.
