Page 28 - BackSpace October 2017

Feature
Chiropractic earthquake relief in central Italy: solidarity is not optional!
Sven Boehne, one of the winners of the ECU Humanitarian Award 2017, tells us what it was like to be in the midst of the 2016 Italian earthquakes
NATURE HAS its own laws, and sometimes it is difficult
for us to adapt to them. For example, central Italy is prone to earthquakes, since it is located directly on the fault line that
has created our beautiful Apennine mountain range: in 1997 a strong earthquake hit the region and in 2009 the medieval town of L’Aquila was damaged by strong tremors, with more than 300 deaths. About 65,000 people had lost their homes as a result of these natural disasters when, on 26 August last year, at about 3am, the earth started moving again...
The town of Amatrice, which was fully-booked with tourists at the time, buried 299 victims in the falling stones of the old town. Virtually nothing was left standing, utter devastation was found when the first rescue services arrived. The terrain had dropped almost 40 inches! Strong aftershocks followed, making first-aid measures extremely hazardous. Almost 400 people had to be admitted to the hospitals in the region. I was abroad at the time, but when we came back to our place (about 30 miles from Amatrice), we found most of our belongings scattered on the floor. But the worst thing about an earthquake is the doubt whether there will be more tremors, even stronger than the previous ones. In fact...
On 30 October, I was still in bed – it was a Sunday morning – when the next earthquake shook us. The epicentre was measured
at 6.5 on the Richter scale, only 15 miles from us. There is often
a strange rumble before you can feel the shaking, and the tremors never seem to end. It was very difficult to walk to the front door as the walls around us were moving heavily, wardrobes were swaying and threatening to block our way out; many objects were falling off the shelves again. Thank God, our apartment was safe, although we are on the top floor – the construction is fairly recent and we didn’t need to leave our home. Many people around us weren’t that lucky, but fortunately no more lives were lost this time.
As I was driving to work the next morning (I live by the mountainside, but my practice is on the coast about 30 miles away) I was wondering what my family should do... Should we pack our things and go back to Germany for a while? Should we move down to the coast? Would there be other quakes, even stronger than the one we had lived through yesterday? If we fled the area would that be a cowardly thing to do? And as a
chiropractor, did I not have command of a powerful array of tools that could help in a direct way? By the time I arrived at clinic I knew, so I picked up the phone and started to organise myself and to mobilise the chiropractic community.
We would have to start our efforts with the local chiropractors. Actually, we aren’t very many in the Marche area, so first of all I called colleagues close by – there would be no need to house them, as they could return to their own homes in the evening. At Amatrice there had been simply no space to house a chiropractic relief effort. Though our situation was different, when the epicentre moved towards us, the afflicted area was becoming extremely large and people were moving out towards the safety of the coast. Many hotels were damaged or reserved for people who had lost their homes. Moreover, the weather was turning bad and it wasn’t easy to organise housing for the numerous colleagues who declared themselves willing to help.
So, I got on the telephone again, this time to organise treatment benches and tents. The Italian Chiropractic Association lent us two mobile benches and two of our local colleagues brought theirs. The local Scouts provided a tent at Sarnano and with the permission of the Red Cross organiser there, we put up the tent, printed leaflets and started to get the word out. Initially I had planned to team up with various psychologists, since the anxiety in the general population was coming to boiling point. In the various places where people were huddled together because they had lost their houses, the aftershocks were creating mental havoc. Unfortunately, the collaboration proved not to be possible for bureaucratic reasons in this ‘modern’ world with its need for insurance, contracts, and formalised organisation.
Having set up in Sarnano, I took another treatment bench and went to the headquarters of the Red Cross at Camerino. When
I presented myself to the secretary there, she declared: “THE CHIROPRACTORS HAVE ARRIVED!!!” What a wonderful moment – the organisers at Camerino already knew us from the relief efforts at L’Aquila, and immediately provided us with a tent and the necessary logistical support. Then, two days later, gale force winds destroyed our tents and we had to start all over again.
As you can imagine, an emergency situation causes huge confusion in logistics: food, water and housing have to be provided, medical services have to be set up, houses have to be secured, entire towns evacuated. Everybody is extremely busy running around, and there are hundreds of homeless people in the midst all this activity. At Camerino, the Sports Palace was home to about 300 elderly people sleeping on makeshift military beds, with only three toilets, and continuous panic caused by the continuing tremors. Moreover, the military had to move in and close down entire villages because burglars were looting the houses that were left uninhabited.
We started off treating in shifts. There were doctors Pelle Daugaard and Roberto Vecchioni who were taking off every moment of their practice time to be present. Doctors Leonard Hardy and Ciro Roberto Errico made themselves available, too.
28 BACKspace www.chiropractic-ecu.org October 2017