Given the nature of his work, Golan Vach is a level-headed man who has seen a lot in his day. “That happened, and it’s something to be happy about.” “Just last week I rescued several people nobody expected to see alive ever again,” he says. “Since our job is pikuach nefesh,” he says, “I haven’t had time for anything but the rescue work.”īut even as hope fades that anyone can be found alive under the rubble after ten days, Golan Vach refuses to state categorically what all fear. Since arriving, there hasn’t been time for that. Inside are dozens of people whose fates we don’t know.”Īs the rescue workers evacuated the disaster site, Vach, 47, who is shomer mitzvos and married with seven children, settled down to use the break to daven and learn Gemara. A building of 50-something meters folded into seven meters. “This is one of the most complicated disaster sites I’ve seen,” Vach, whose civilian job involves promoting the development of Israel’s Galilee, told Mishpacha. Rushed from civilian life to Florida within days of the Surfside collapse, the team’s arrival on site in their olive-green uniforms - headed by Vach in his kippah - breathed new hope into many family members desperate to see faster progress to free loved ones who may have been alive underneath the rubble.īut despite their extensive disaster experience, the Surfside collapse is a tragedy the scale of which the Israeli team has rarely encountered. In one video that surfaced after the disaster, a Jewish woman begged a Miami official to bring in the Israelis: “They know what they’re doing, because they have to deal with emergencies,” she said, while the official attempted to assure her that the US was a world leader in disaster recovery. Within hours of the building’s collapse, and as it became clear that dozens of Jews, including Israelis, had been in the building, a call went out for Israel to send its rescue teams. A veteran of previous international disaster-scene deployments, he’s taken part in the Home Front Command’s rescue missions after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2013 Philippines typhoon, the 2017 Mexico earthquake, the 2019 Brazil dam disaster, and the 2019 earthquake in Albania. They watched as the jagged-edged remains of Champlain Towers South trembled and then collapsed in on themselves in a cloud of dust as engineers demolished the remaining wing due to safety concerns.Īmong the hundreds of rescue workers forced to stop their work for a few hours was Colonel (Res.) Golan Vach, commander of Israel’s National Rescue Unit, a division of the IDF’s Home Front Command. The exhausted rescue teams, who’ve cycled in and out of 12-hour shifts, stepped back from the ocean-front disaster zone. On Sunday this week, for the first time in ten days of feverish rescue efforts, silence fell over the grim mound of pancaked concrete that is the site of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida. Commander Golan Vach of Israel’s National Rescue Unit speaks about the toil, the heartbreak, and fanning the fading embers of hope
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