Four members of Lincolnshire Fire & Rescue heading to Turkey to help with earthquake rescue efforts
Colin, a search and rescue dog is also going with them
Last updated 7th Feb 2023
Four firefighters and a search and rescue dog from Lincolnshire will be heading to Turkey as part of International Search and Rescue efforts, following two strong earthquakes in the south-eastern province of Kahramanmaras.
They will be part of a 76- strong team from the UK who have been requested to assist.
Due to fly out today is Group Manager Ashley Hildred who is usually based at Headquarters in Nettleham.
Experienced dog handler from Sleaford, Neil Woodmansey is also part of the team with Colin – his search and rescue dog.
Two further team members are Crew Manager Colin Calam from Sleaford fire station and Crew Manager Mark Dungworth from Lincoln South fire station.
It comes as three British nationals are missing after the huge earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
UK aid charities say reports of the devastation are just the "tip of the iceberg".
In a statement in the Commons on Tuesday, Foreign Secretary James Cleveley said the department's Crisis Response Hub is working to support at least 35 Britons caught up in the disaster.
He added: "We assess that the likelihood of large-scale British casualties remains low."
A number of relief organisations have urged the public to dig deep and donate, saying the help they are able to provide over the next few days "will save lives".
The 7.8 magnitude quake hit Turkish city Gaziantep in the early hours of Monday, reducing thousands of homes and buildings across the south of the country and northern Syria to rubble as people slept.
More than 5,000 people across both nations are so far confirmed to have died in the natural disaster, though the figure is rising as a search and rescue operation continues.
Difficult conditions, including freezing temperatures, are said to be hampering efforts, particularly in rebel-held Syria, where people have fewer resources and there is a lack of routes to deliver aid through.
Among those joining the relief effort are 12 crew members from the London Fire Brigade and 76 search and rescue specialists being sent by the UK Government with state-of-the-art equipment and four specially trained dogs.
Meanwhile, British Turkish Association spokesman Atilla Ustun, 55, praised communities across London, which he said have helped raise between £200,000 and £300,000, which has paid for 300 boxes of donated aid to be sent on a Turkish Airlines cargo plane from Heathrow.
Dilan Altun, a 22-year-old Turk living in London, said she has tens of relatives who are now homeless and has been told people are dying after being rescued due to sub-zero conditions.
After the rescue mission, providing shelter is aid organisations' priority, while there is also a need for food, clean water and warm clothes.
James Denselow, UK head of conflict and humanitarian advocacy for Save the Children UK, told the PA news agency: "The scale of this earthquake, in terms of not just strength but the kind of actual absolute sprawl of it has meant that we've had to spend a lot of time in this first phase checking in on needs, checking in on what is working logistically, checking that all our people are OK.
"Because you've got airports out of action, hospitals collapsed, clinics collapsed, all the sort of places we would normally use are not necessarily accessible.
"All the figures you're hearing are way off what will be the final figures, and what I'm hearing from staff and colleagues closer to the emergency is that everything we're seeing in the media is tip-of-the-iceberg stuff.
"So we're still really just unravelling the fog of this disaster.
"Providing shelter is the most urgent type of aid from our perspective because the cold will kill people in ways that are less spectacular than the earthquake but equally deadly."
The United Nations this year launched a record 51.5 billion US dollar (£43 billion) appeal to help 339 million people now in need of assistance in 69 countries and 100 million who are displaced - a result of, among other issues, the pandemic on the world's poorest, droughts and flooding in East Africa and Pakistan and the Ukraine conflict.