The lifelong toll of surviving disaster

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0:39Hello, I'm James Reynolds. This time in the documentary, it's BBC Conversations, where we bring people together to share their experiences. This time, survivors of disasters tell us about the lifelong effects of what they've had to endure.

0:58It's been a month now, since the twin earthquakes in Venezuela. As we record this programme on Friday lunchtime, it's estimated that more than 5 ,000 people have died. There have also been some remarkable stories of rescue. People have been pulled alive from the rubble many days after the disaster. In our conversations this week, we bring together two people who survived disasters themselves. We'll also hear from rescue workers. all talk about the long-term, lifelong impact on their lives. We'll hear in a moment from Maddie Nell. She survived Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines in 2013. It was one of the strongest typhoons in recorded history.

1:40Firstly, though, let's hear from Jeff. He was a pupil at the junior school in Aberfan in South Wales. In October 1966, when he was eight years old, a tip made up of waste from coal mines came crashing down the hillside above his village. The disaster killed 116 children and 28 adults. That day, a school day, had begun like any other. I walked to school with my friend Robert and we went to the tuck shop at the end of the lake. After we got some sweets we went into the school, we put our coats in the cloakroom, went into the classroom and I was on library books. I just finished a Janet and John series of books and I got here's Aventures of Tintin off the window near us the tip.

2:31I returned to my seat and then the teacher started the mathematics lesson and there was a roaring sound and the teacher reassured the class that there was nothing to worry about. It was only thunder. The lights then started to swing in the classroom The next thing I remember was waking up with all this material over me. I didn't realise what had happened to me. I could hear shouts and screams, and those shouts and screams got less and less as time went along. Because the majority of people who died in that class either died of physical trauma as a result of the tip material and the roof caving in, or from asphyxiation.

3:15The reason that I survived, I had a pocket of air around me. I couldn't move because the desk was against my stomach. There was a dead girl on my left shoulder and I was just wanting to get out but couldn't physically get out because of all the material above me. I then heard someone shout, close your eyes, we're going to smash the window. They started to dig around me, got the material off me. They broke up their desk with the hatchet and then I was pulled out of where I was sitting and thrown from one fireman to another out into the yard. And then medics saw us out there. It was just after 11 o 'clock that I was dug out of the school and I was the last one alive to come out of the school.

4:05I had sustained injuries to my head and my stomach but those physical injuries would heal pretty quickly it was the psychological injuries that would be with me for the rest of my life I suffered from nightmares I wetted the bed I was irritable I lacked concentration and it was difficult to go back to the school because I feared that the tip would come down again One minute I was an innocent child going to school and the next minute I was next door to death within inches and my life had just been totally turned upside down. It wasn't until three in the morning on November 8th, 2013, when I woke up to the cries of help of my family, of my parents.

4:57And, you know, like the shout, the cries, the prayers that you can hear at that time, it was, I still feel that feeling up until now because I've never seen my parents or our elders be in that panic mode. As you may know, if you're Asian, you always kind of toughen it up. You don't really show your emotion, especially like for our fathers. And that was the only time that I saw my father cry because we didn't know what to do. All the debris was going into our evacuation center. We had windows that were glasses. We were trying to fit all of us in one corner where there was no window, but it wasn't enough.

5:43It wasn't safe for us because there wasn't that much space. I remember seeing a gymnasium in front of us. It was like a basketball court. And at first, if you see it, you know, it looks really strong. But during that time, the roof of that gymnasium was just flying away as if it was just papers. And some houses in front of us was just washed out by the water. And I saw this lady carrying a baby. And I think this is the most painful part for me is like seeing the baby and there was a wave. and the mother survived but we weren't able to see the baby anymore. And just seeing that firsthand, I still have that trauma in me because even though it's been more than a decade, I haven't really processed that feeling that I could see people dying in front of us and everyone thought that we were all dead because we were at the end of the peninsula facing the Pacific Ocean, first landfall.

6:46and it wasn't until like three days or five days when an American helicopter was giving relief aid to another town and they saw that there are people there and that's when we got help. Marinelle, thank you so much and Jeff, you've heard Marinelle's story and Marinelle also saying that she's yet to process all that trauma from 2013. I wonder what you would say to her. It's very important to speak about it because the more you don't speak about it, it creates greater anxiety and stress and really makes you really ill. So my advice to anybody involved in a major trauma or incident is to speak about it.

7:27And it's far easier to speak to a stranger than it is actually speaking to a close relative. we now know that the phenomena that we went through of the irritability, the depression, the bedwetting etc is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. In those days the support that we had was very primitive in terms of counselling. I did go to one counsellor and that counsellor said to me when you see the girl's face, when you review what you've been through think of happy things like birthday parties. Well, the majority of people that would have come to my birthday party were now gone. So all those children are gone, so it wasn't very good advice to be forced to.

8:14And the interesting thing is, I can actually smell the coldest when I'm looking at these programmes of the disaster occurring and seeing people being dragged out of a similar situation that I was in. as if those 60 years that have passed haven't happened. It's so difficult to be honest. This is the 60th anniversary of the Anbran disaster in October of this year. And we've been doing a lot of interviews for television and for radio. And it's really constantly bringing that memory back to us. I find it far easier to speak about it now and get less emotionally involved than I used to. but I'd just been down in the school reading their research on the Avon disaster and it was really, really emotional for me hearing about those kids.

9:13I'm so sorry, Geoff. Well, the important message for everybody, I think, is that anybody who's involved in a disaster or in a terrorist attack is actually speak about it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Yeah, that's also the reason why I started speaking up because I felt a huge survivor's guilt when I survived Superdif on Haiyan. Seeing some family and friends, you know, they didn't survive the typhoon. I was questioning myself, like, why did I survive? What's my role in this? And that's when I really started being climate activist, doing a lot of negotiation and lobbying with our government to give us dignified relocation houses, to get people accountable and corporations accountable for the climate crisis.

10:08And I think, I guess I have a question for you too, Jeff, is that we've been sharing our stories to build awareness that these things happen and it really affects real people in my life. and we have been living the effect of climate change. But it has gotten to a point that sometimes, you know, we cannot avoid it. Media would romanticize it always that whenever they get a chance, they will ask about that experience without any warning. And sometimes I'm taken aback by that sometimes because I do like talking about my experience, but relieving that experience over and over again. Sometimes it can be hard, but I think, I don't know, what's been your experience?

11:02Every 10 years, we have a media circus here, really, wanting to cover the disaster and how we've recovered, etc. And what does annoy me is journalists turning up, and they haven't done their basic research. so they ask you stupid questions like how many children died and how many others or what date it was on you know which is totally and utterly frustrating over the last 10 years or so speaking to journalists and it's now covered in journalism schools that people come here they want an interview from you they actually really you actually relive the circumstances of the day And then they leave and you're left on a cliff, effectively trying to calm yourself back down to where you were prior to the visit of them.

11:50And now a lot of journalists have psychological support for people to bring them back down. The one that I had done, which was a watershed for me, was the Netflix program on the Queen's involvement with Aberfan. and it was an emotional journey, very emotional journey, but they actually provided psychologists help after that. And I'm seeing more and more journalists and television companies particularly providing you with that support to bring you back down to a level instead of being left at a precipice and you finding your own way back down. So that's an important development, I think, which is appreciated by more survivors of disaster.

12:36And I think we're very lucky at this time that there are a lot of support because in 2013, there wasn't really that much support for me to process what happened. Basically, we were just surviving every other day for one. And we were so in a survival mode that we felt like it wasn't important for us to process the loss of loved ones because we were always thinking of what to eat, where to go, how to survive the next typhoon. It really hit me so hard that I was so young and I felt like I have so much that I want to do in life. But at that time, I was just thinking if it was even fair for me to dream because I feel like everyone is just trying to survive and trying to get through every typhoon and dreaming at that time felt like selfish um so i'm really glad that there are a lot of support and that that people are awakening now on how to tend to this kind of stories and to make sure that survivors are also being taken care of and that as you said earlier that we are not just they are not just using us for information but also like really using this information to tell people that it is happening and it has been affecting a lot of lives.

14:00But also, we need to take care of the people that have survived. That's right. And in terms of involvement in public services, like you're doing with climate change, it's so important because you can push that agenda forward. Like I've been involved in public services here in terms of regeneration and in terms of developing services for survivors. and I've recently been appointed to the National Emergencies Trust in the UK, which is a body that has got loads of experience of people who've been involved in major trauma and a part of their remit is actually helping people get through those sad times that they're enduring.

14:43So public service is so important to survivors in raising the profile of these events but also ensuring that governments provide support services for people. What you tend to find is that when a disaster happens, government will throw money at it and effectively people who are involved in a major trauma then don't really know what they want in terms of support. The chain of support can take over 10, 20, 30 years, but in 30, 40 years' time that money is not available. So it's important that we plan for the future for people who suffer a lifetime, really, of the experiences that they're endured.

15:24Geoff, who survived the Abafan disaster in Wales, and Marinel in the Philippines, a survivor of Typhoon Haiyan. Just a quick word on how we approach people who've gone through this kind of trauma. Our producers always talk to our guests before the recording about what to expect. And then when we do record, we try to keep the conversation as relaxed and as respectful as possible. Then afterwards, we follow up with our guests to check if they're OK. I'm James Reynolds. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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16:39For our second conversation, we've brought together rescue workers. They choose to do a job which exposes them to trauma, stress and loss. How then do they cope? My colleague Luke Jones spoke to Daniel, who works for the charity Shelterbox. He changed career after surviving a major disaster himself. And Alex is from the UK-based charity Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters. He's an engineer and was involved in helping to rescue people in the immediate aftermath of the 2023 earthquakes in Syria and Turkey. We deployed to Marash, one of the cities devastated by the earthquakes, taking on search and rescue operations.

17:23The first evening we were there on the Wednesday and rescued a mother and a child from a building and also had to identify the rest of the family, which we weren't able to rescue, and then carried on search operations throughout the city and had another live rescue late on the Friday evening, so five days after the event. Many more unsuccessful searches throughout the city during that time. And that was particularly devastating, that earthquake. I think it's about 53 ,000 people lost their lives in that. What was it like for you, I guess, sort of just practically, but also emotionally having to go through all of that as well?

17:59I find that quite interesting, that number is huge and almost has kind of no emotional effect on me. I remember at one point seeing in front of me, there was a few tower blocks that had collapsed that week. Rough calculation must have been three or 4 ,000 people they'd lost their lives in. But it was the much smaller moments, the sort of where you actually, it kind of hits home. I remember just a mum standing on the side of the road begging for some food for her two children. And that hit me far harder than that 50 ,000 number you see in the paper. just an uncle outside of the flat that we'd searched confirmed that there were only dead bodies in there and he stayed there on his own at sort of two in the morning to pray for the family that were in there those real slight small moments kind of yeah they strike strike home that family where we rescued the mother and the daughter I had to go back into well we didn't find the the son alive that child was the same age as as my son back home so it took yeah sort of a few months upon returning to keep processing that.

19:04Daniel, you were actually a survivor of the awful tsunami that happened Boxing Day in 2004 when you were on holiday in Sri Lanka. Tell us about that, if you would, first of all, and how that led you into the line of work you do now. We'd had a great month or so surfing, and we were woken up on Boxing Day morning to some shouts and screams, and we were staying with a local family. It was really cheap to do so, and the family were really wonderful, and right by really good waves. So it worked all around. And we were waking up to shouting and screaming and you could throw a cricket ball from where we were sleeping into the sea on the best of days.

19:41But on this particular day, I opened up the curtains and saw that there was this big, huge wave coming through and it smashed the building. We were in the compound, washed us through a ditch across the roads and then into the jungle, a hundred or so metres. And that kind of was the start of a week or so of learning what it was to be displaced and the limited amount of actual support that is around. As you say, that was the trigger. That's what got me really interested in the sector and wanting to be part of a response. But tell me about that decision, because there are many people who will have gone through something like that and would never want to go anywhere near anything like it ever again.

20:19What was the moment where you thought, well, actually, I would like to put myself back into those kind of situations, albeit a situation with slightly more control? I felt like my psyche was torn into. I absolutely didn't even want to leave when we had the opportunity to leave Sri Lanka. I wanted to stay and to be able to help more people. But in actual fact, I was overwhelmed and out of my depth. And I realised that me staying would have been a drain on the capacity of the responders. So going home was the right decision. But yeah, later on, just kind of working through what had happened and really understanding that one minute you're living with a community and the next minute, a lot of them aren't there anymore.

20:58And that people are relying on a lot of support. Their access to recovery really depends on what capacity they have and what capacity the local government has. and so it's really varied and we were with some really kind of low-income families and just recognizing how slow their response or their ability to spring back was and so I just yeah I wanted to figure out a way of getting involved with helping that response and it was it was scary like my first response was actually for super typhoon high-end November 2013 and I remember being yeah scared when we got into country and it gets better slowly over time but originally like there were triggers so any needs assessment I was doing down by the shore if the storms were coming in again because often we're working in contexts where you know there's seasonal extreme weather events and so yeah my heart like when I saw the the pressure systems on the map on the maps I would be really nervous and um focusing on them especially when leading teams and being responsible for other people but now yeah the those kind of triggers are a lot more I think I've got so much training and professionalism now in the way that I handle them that it's it's dissipated a lot it's still there but it's dissipated it's manageable yeah I think actually the touch on the point there um about the training the training for us provides the complete framework of decision making that that we go through I don't think you can sometimes prepare yourself for the small thing that will sort of trigger a response or a memory.

22:38I know for me personally, I thought I felt fine after Turkey and then I took my family to Disneyland and suddenly it just felt completely wrong seeing sort of, I guess, other families having fun. And yeah, something about being in that manufactured place of happiness suddenly felt sort of really outrageously unfair that we got to experience this and these other families that sort of lost everything um we're still living in probably horrific sort of conditions trying to trying to make it through you know there's no logical connection between those it's just the the situation that brought it back really disasters just avoid of any kind of normality you start seeing a pattern the more more you respond but everything is like against the grain and certainly where there's loss of life or continued risk to life.

23:31And I think probably Alex with Sarrade being at the forefront, you probably feel it more than most because you're still looking for signs of life and trying to rescue people. So the passions must be really high. Quite often you see things that are jarring for the human psyche, that kind of survivor guilt thing, which is you feel a guilt for feeling guilty even because you're working with people that you know at some stage you'll be able to go home and the people that you're serving won't be able to. They'll be in that context or for the lives that have been lost. So you have this strange guilt to work through.

24:07Rescue workers Daniel and Alex. Our thanks to them and also to Geoff and Marie Nell as well. It cannot have been easy for any of them to tell their stories. I'm James Reynolds. You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. Not Right