From the Army to disaster zones
After leaving the Army, these servicemen and women are deployed in disaster zones with profound results, reports Guy Kelly
It doesn’t take much for an earthquake to cause chaos. In a country lacking the infrastructure required to protect itself, it is generally taken that anything over 4.0-magnitude on the Richter scale can be catastrophic within seconds. That’s before any aftershocks begin, before the landslides start, before the tsunami risk is accounted for, and well before the repair costs are thought about.
The Indonesian island of Lombok has suffered more than 30 earthquakes in excess of 4.0-magnitude, with more than 700 aftershocks, in the past month alone. The latest – a 6.3-magnitude quake on Sunday that was felt as far away as Bali – caused yet more panic and deaths in what is becoming a near never-ending season of horror. So far, more than 500 people have died, around 402,000 have been displaced, and around 800 schools have been damaged. It is the natural disaster that refuses to abate.
Yet while local authorities scramble, 7,000 miles away in an office in Chilmark, Wiltshire, a unique British disaster response organisation is readying help.
Team Rubicon UK (TRUK), a charity founded during the Nepal earthquakes of 2015, uses the skills and experience of military veterans and first responders to quickly deploy volunteer emergency response teams whenever – and wherever – disaster strikes.
It could mean helping victims of flash flooding in the UK, as they did in Birmingham in May, or long-term projects after hurricane damage, such as on the British Virgin Islands last summer. “Within a few minutes of the first earthquake hitting in July, our alerts came in, and phones started ringing,” says Oz Lane, 46, Team Rubicon’s director of field operations. “We’re monitoring the situation from Chilmark, and providing technical assistance to a local NGO. It’s not good out there, and it’s not over yet.”
While giving the authorities in Indonesia the space to coordinate their own response at the moment, Team Rubicon is assessing things closely, especially the most heavily-affected areas. It is in the maelstrom of a disaster zone where Team Rubicon is most valuable, and where its teams’ military skills come in handy. In times of distress, some NGOS can dither, others aren’t trained to offer disaster relief, and emergency services are frequently overwhelmed.
The collective experience of Team Rubicon’s vast, largely volunteer group of responders, however, means they are prepared to walk into trouble while others are evacuating, can navigate hard-to-reach areas and offer practical help when they get there. It is the point of the organisation’s name, in fact: they are more than happy to “cross the Rubicon”.
“These are people who have been extensively trained in precisely the sorts of situations that can occur when a disaster hits, and after their time in the military, many of them still felt they could offer help,” says Richard Sharp, the charity’s CEO.
A 35-year-old former Royal Marine, Sharp is a prime example of the sort of people Team Rubicon tries to recruit. Following his final tour of Afghanistan in 2011, he was medically discharged after suffering hearing damage from an IED blast. A few years in the City and a stint working for Help for Heroes left him feeling keen to see some action again; he joined Team Rubicon last November.
“Something was missing, I didn’t like office work at all and felt like I had a lot more to give, which is how a lot of people feel if they have leaving thrust upon them. Team Rubicon is exactly the sort of place where people like me, and a lot of my old colleagues, can still contribute. I say it a lot, but service is in our DNA.”
In Sharp’s opinion, the portrayal of military veterans in Britain has become skewed too much towards seeing our former servicemen and women as victims. Many veterans of recent conflicts are physically and mentally damaged by war, he acknowledges, but many also aren’t.
“To be honest, I’m sick and tired of that overly sympathetic view. PTSD is a major issue, and I know that from first-hand experience with a lot of my colleagues, but over the last decade a narrative has been told that’s resulted in us looking at former soldiers as tragic figures,” he says. “In reality, the vast majority of us are far from victims; we’re still young, still fit and capable, still eager to help and still in possession of the best military training in the world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have left a whole population of people like that, so why don’t we put them to good use?”
With the motto “disasters are our business, veterans are our passion”, Team Rubicon UK was created as part of Team Rubicon Global, a Us-led organisation formed in 2010. Five years later, General Sir Nick Parker, who served as Commander Land Forces until December 2012 and sits on the board of Team Rubicon
Global, asked for UK veterans to offer their time and skills to provide help in the aftermath of the 7.8-magnitude Nepal earthquake. The team he recruited provided rapid medical aid, translation assistance and search and rescue support, and Team Rubicon UK was born.
“We specialise a lot in a thing called ‘last mile logistics’, which means getting to the very hardest to reach areas, and carrying the lightest and most advanced kit we can,” says Nick Spicer, 34, a former infantry officer in the Yorkshire Regiment who is one of almost 2,500 volunteers with the charity. When an operation is launched, Lane first sends a small reconnaissance team to the affected area, that will make an “impact assessment” judging what kind of help is needed, and report back. Teams of up to a dozen will then follow, for two-week periods (the longest that volunteers can take off work, after they’ve responded to a call from headquarters), working until they are no longer needed. In the British Virgin Islands, where Hurricane Irma destroyed thousands of homes last summer, Team Rubicon stayed for 10 weeks.
“A lot of our partners work in renewable energy, or we have expertise in that area, and so we can combine that with military efficiency to provide something like a very lightweight water purifier to somewhere you’d never normally reach, and without harming the environment. That can be very quick to set up but have a very long-lasting impact,” Spicer says. “We never want to outstay our welcome, either, but we will see a project through and go back to check on progress long after the cameras have gone.”
In Lombok, it isn’t known how long the run of tectonic activity will carry on for. Some predict another six months, which is a terrifying prospect, but Lane – who served in a dozen countries over more than two decades as an infantry officer in the Army – knows from experience that there may be trouble ahead.
“‘It’s not usually the disaster that kills, it’s what follows, it’s the potential for water contamination, the possible epidemic. What we’re hearing from the ground is that the Lombok population is broken, and without the technical expertise, it could be a long recovery,” he adds. “But as I say, we’re on it.”