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Less than four hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001,
Mark Tamaro was onsite to begin a seven-day rescue and recovery mission as part of the Montgomery County,
Maryland Urban Search and Rescue team. He and fellow volunteers make up one of 29 teams nationwide organized
by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
A member of the Montgomery County team since 1998, Tamaro serves as a structural specialist, providing first responders to disasters with rapid structural assessments of buildings to determine if collapsed structures appear safe to enter, the design of temporary shoring where needed, assistance in removal of partially failed structures, and monitoring of structures for stability.
While it was the altruism that first drew Tamaro to this work, he said, “there is
a technical and professional curiosity that gets satisfied. You can learn an awful lot from the behavior of a compromised structure about how to build a better one.”
Jon Tung also volunteers as a structural specialist on an Urban Search and Rescue team in Fairfax County, Virginia that responds to domestic emergencies through FEMA and internationally through
the U.S. Agency for International
Development/Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. A native of Taiwan, his
first deployment was to his home country following an earthquake in 1999.
Since then Tung has also deployed to Iran following the December 2003 earthquake that killed 26,000 people; to Indonesia, where 280,000 perished following the December 2004 earthquake
and tsunami; and to numerous hurricane scenes on the U.S. East Coast.
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