They made the news. Cyrille Chauveau, French rescuer during the February earthquake in Türkiye

On February 6, 2023, in the middle of the night, southern Turkey was shaken by a powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.8 followed by an aftershock of magnitude 7.5 in neighboring Syria. France sent the next day 73 rescuers from the Nogent-Le-Rotrou civil security training and intervention unit, including Lieutenant-Colonel Cyrille Chauveau.

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First destination: the city of Osmanye, where they will stay 24 hours in search of survivors among the rubble, helped by dogs and radars which can detect movement up to ten meters deep.

At 40, Lieutenant-Colonel Chauveau is passionate about his job as a rescuer, a mixture of adrenaline and commitment: he, who has just returned from a forest firefighting mission in Canada, remembers Turkey. He had just been sent for the first time on an earthquake.

Cities in ruins

Before the race against time to save lives, he says, there is the immense logistical challenge. To work and live independently, the relief workers brought 24 tonnes of material from Paris, which had to be transported from Adana airport to Osmanye, a ghost and disaster-stricken town, where they remained for 24 hours, then from Osmanye to Antioch, after an eight-hour journey. A few months after this mission, in Antioch, in ruins, he remembers visual and sound sensations.

Cyrille Chauveau and his colleagues returned to Turkey at the end of April, after an official ceremony organized by the authorities of Ankara to thank the help of the hundred countries which intervened. The earthquake in Turkey, one of the deadliest of the 21st century, killed more than 55,000 people according to the official report and more than one hundred billion in damage according to the Turkish authorities.