America’s premier search teams are headed to Venezuela to help find and rescue survivors among the rubble.
USA-01 and USA-02 — from Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue in Virginia and from Los Angeles — were activated within hours of the deadly quakes.
USA-01 is now waiting to fly 79 team members, 70,000 pounds of equipment and six sniffer dogs into the disaster zone.
The elite crew, which mainly consists of firefighters but also deploys medics, engineers and dog handlers, has previously carried out missions in deadly natural disasters including the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and the Japanese tsunami of 2011.
Both rescue teams carried out a training exercise just last month in Virginia to prepare for a large scale earthquake.
“The State Department are working on all options to get us there the fastest, so we’ll be out the door as soon as we possibly can,” public information officer John Morrison told The Post.
“We specialize in reaching deeply entombed victims in collapsed reinforced concrete buildings that nobody else can get to.
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“This kind of situation is exactly what we train for – we just had an exercise about a month ago with LA coming over to Fairfax County and for five days we prepared for a large scale earthquake in a dense urban core.
“So we’re ready.”
The announcement comes as the US military’s SOUTHCOM announced it is also mobilizing resources to help with earthquake response in the South American country – whose infrastructure has been decimated by decades of socialist rule.
