Expedition
Meet the war heroes spearheading international disaster-relief operations
They’re one of the world’s foremost disaster-relief organisations, dropping into danger zones to help society’s most vulnerable. Here’s how a team of military veterans formed Team Rubicon.
January 12, 2010. It was 4.53pm when the earthquake hit the island of Hispaniola.
In the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince – 25km to the north-east of the epicentre – people were going about their business. Suddenly the ground shook, buildings cracked to their foundations, and the entire world was turned inside out. By the time the 7.0 magnitude earthquake had subsided, almost 300,000 buildings had collapsed or been severely damaged. It was a disaster that, according to various government estimates, claimed between 230,000 and 316,000 lives.
Alongside the many thousands dead were embassy staff, the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, and 32 members of the Haitian Football Federation. A further 1.5m people were made homeless, among them then-President René Préval, who found himself dispossessed after both his home and the presidential palace were destroyed. In the nights following the quake, many Haitians slept in cars, doorways and makeshift shanty towns.
By January 14, the city’s morgues were full, meaning that many bodies were left in the streets as crews trucked thousands more to mass graves. Meanwhile, the thousands of unrecovered bodies buried in rubble began to decompose in the heat and humidity. With five hospitals in Port-au-Prince destroyed or damaged, and roads blocked by debris, the situation in this, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, was desperate. While the international community organised relief operations, former US Marine Jake Wood watched events unfold on the news. With a four-year tour in the Middle East under his belt, including counter-insurgency missions in Iraq’s bloody Anbar Province and eight months on a sniper team in Afghanistan, he felt compelled to help. Just 60 days out of the military, Wood was fit, experienced at operating in destabilised countries, and had many transferable skills.
People were digging for survivors. There weren’t enough aid workers
Torn apart
© Alamy
Wood, then 27, called a local disaster relief organisation to offer his services, but was turned down. Determined to get to Haiti under his own steam, he posted on Facebook, asking if anyone wanted to join him. Former Marine intelligence officer William McNulty, a 33-year-old friend of a friend, answered the call. The pair flew to the Dominican Republic – Haiti’s neighbour on Hispaniola – meeting up with another marine, and a mate of Wood’s who happened to be a firefighter. En route, they met a former special forces medic and two doctors, one of whom was a Vietnam War veteran. The motley group touched down in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, and were transferred to the Haitian border, arriving four days after the quake.
“It was total chaos,” remembers Wood. “There was this dust cloud in the air from all the rubble. People were digging for survivors. There weren’t enough aid workers on the planet to adequately address the needs there."
Determined to prove themselves and help as many people as possible, Wood’s team set out to transport doctors and nurses to hard-hit areas, establish mobile triage clinics, and get critical patients to hospital. “Organisations usually focus on hospitals and setting up static clinics,” Wood says, “but often people’s vehicles are destroyed, or they’ll be hesitant to leave their home because of looters. Half the people we were treating had horrific crush injuries and couldn’t walk to a hospital. We were pushing out into these parts of the city and treating people on sight.”
Relief planning
© Team Rubicon
On January 23, just 11 days after the quake, the Haitian government declared the end of the search-and-rescue phase of the relief operation. But Wood’s team would stay 20 days, only leaving when it became clear that other agencies were better equipped to deal with the longer-term fallout.
Kicking disasters in the teeth
Wood and McNulty’s experiences had instilled in them a determination to keep helping the vulnerable, so Team Rubicon was formed then and there. If the relief operation had taught them one thing, it was that as military veterans they had much to offer.
In the decade since Haiti, Team Rubicon have gone from strength to strength. They've responded to 310 disasters across the globe – from the Bahamas to Mozambique, Indonesia to Yorkshire – in 2019 alone. Today, their staff, whom Team Rubicon jokingly urges to “Sign up. Get trained. Kick disasters in the teeth”, have grown to an estimated 105,000 volunteers; 75 percent of these are either military veterans or still in active duty, and 20 percent are fire, medical or law-enforcement professionals.
Rebuilding in Nepal
© Getty
Growing the organisation and proving it was worthy of investment – those onboard now include Carhartt, Bank of America and Microsoft – was a long, slow process. Instrumental to Team Rubicon’s journey was Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 disaster that cost 223 lives and caused more than US$70b in damage across the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, US and Canada. The team set to work clearing houses in one of the hardest-hit areas, New York City – an affluent metropolis that was a stark contrast to Haiti. “We slept in a warehouse in Brooklyn,” Wood says. “We could walk up the street, covered in mud, get an ice-cold beer, and it was like the hurricane had never hit.”
Despite the home comforts, Team Rubicon were focused on assisting the city’s more exposed citizens. “There was a high population of firefighters and police officers [in the area we were working in],” says Wood. “People who had to put on the uniform every day and go help someone else while their home was rotting.” By mucking out their homes, Wood’s team was paying back some of this service.
Operation Macuti Light
© Team Rubicon
Team Rubicon’s desire to help those most in need is innate. “We always direct our aid to the most vulnerable people, and that doesn’t necessarily mean where the most damage is,” says Wood. “We go street by street, documenting the destruction. This is then mapped and combined with data sets like the social vulnerability index, flood plain levels, crime levels – any demographic information we can get. From that, we see who the most vulnerable people are.”
If Sandy was the event that put Team Rubicon on the map, 2017’s Hurricane Harvey tested their abilities. When Harvey hit Houston, the team deployed more than 2,000 volunteers from nine forward-operating bases covering 300km. As part of their response, Team Rubicon bought their own boats and sent them down to fish survivors from the water. As a result of the rescue and clear-up operation, it was responsible for putting more than 1,000 families back in their homes
It looked like a nuclear wasteland
Hurricane Dorian
© Team Rubicon
Then, in 2019, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, becoming one of the most powerful recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, with winds peaking at 300kph. Team Rubicon deployed to the islands the day after the storm hit.
“It looked like a nuclear wasteland,” Wood says. “All the trees were snapped off 8ft [around 2.4m] above the ground and bent back in one direction, like a nuclear blast had hit them. Every power line was down, every building destroyed.”
Rebuilding homes and lives
In the reception area of Team Rubicon’s national operations centre in Grand Prairie, Texas, is a cartoon mural of former US President Theodore Roosevelt in boxing attire, leaning against the ropes after a tough round in the ring. Alongside are headshots of the company’s hardest-working employees of the last quarter, and a quote from Roosevelt’s 1910 speech The Man in the Arena: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...”
“Our CEO thinks the man in the arena is the one who should get the press and recognition,” explains William ’TJ’ Porter, deputy director of operational support, whose own picture is among those hanging on the wall. After a 13-year career in the military and then as a law-enforcement officer, Porter joined Team Rubicon in 2012 and has since been deployed to the aftermaths of multiple tornadoes, wildfires, and more.
Hurricane Harvey
© Team Rubicon
“Team Rubicon sets itself apart [from other relief organisations] in two ways,” he explains. “We can either be part of the response, doing everything from search-and-rescue to felling trees and opening up roads, or we can provide direct assistance to survivors.”
The latter usually involves helping those with no or little insurance to return to their home. Team Rubicon will gut the entire house, then refit new flooring and dry wall – an initiative that has sparked a long-term rebuilding programme in Houston. Assisting in this way is, Porter says, one of the most gratifying parts of the job. “When something like [Hurricane Harvey] happens, people don’t know where to turn. We get them to a point where they have a stable house to live in. All the gratitude you receive from the survivors is so overwhelming. To see someone go from being in shock, with a 20,000-yard stare, to realising ‘Hey, at least I have something now, and I can build from there’ is really intoxicating.”
The team’s Texas office is one of three in the US, housing a total of 150 full-time staff. Just a short car ride from Dallas, the base was chosen for its central location and for its proximity to two international airports. Team Rubicon moved here in early 2016 and now have 29 staff working in the office. There are no fancy flourishes here; it looks like they turned up one day four years ago, dumped their stuff and got to work. It is from this office that all operations are organised, including transportation, logistics, field leadership and mobilisation.
Team Rubicon providing vital support in the Northern Mariana Islands
© Team Rubicon
Team Rubicon operate domestically and internationally, with operations planning associates Adam Martin, Lauren Vatier and Jacqueline Pherigo scrubbing news sources daily to track developing situations. Should a disaster occur, the question is whether Team Rubicon has the capabilities and resources to support another operation alongside those already in progress.
“Any time we have volunteers in the field already, our priority is taking care of them, whether it’s smaller localised operations, or volunteers heading to an international response,” explains Martin. “What do we need to do to support them? What do they need today?”
Part of this involves liaising with other organisations to see what response is being arranged elsewhere and how Team Rubicon can best support this, Vatier explains. Occasionally, the request for help comes from outside agencies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO). It’s a point of pride that, following a rigorous 18-month process, Team Rubicon was the first NGO in North America to be WHO-certified as a mobile emergency medical team – “a tough credential to get,” says Porter. This means that it meets exacting standards for deploying units to remote or austere environments and remaining self-sufficient for up to seven days.
In the back of the office space is a large warehouse area – essentially a survivalist’s wet dream – filled with everything from chainsaws and foldable cots to tech boxes. Each of the latter contains three laptops, five iPhones, a connector, a router and more, ensuring that each team remains connected in even the most remote environments. With this equipment, the team are also able to consult a remote doctor who can step in and advise when medical staff on the ground are sparse.
Operation Hard Hustle in Texas
© Team Rubicon
Naturally, there is a plentiful supply of medication catering to pre-hospital care including cuts, fractures and tetanus, as well as plastic containers full of medical packs with everything from tents to water purification systems. “The reality of the situation is that the majority of times we go out, we encounter people with a lack of access to healthcare,” explains Porter. “We’ve had to deal with infected lacerations. We need to be prepared to temporarily set a broken bone. There can be malnourishment or no access to clean drinking water, so we carry antibiotics, too.”
The operations centre also houses an impressive gym with TRX (body-weight resistance training) equipment, workout benches and pull-up bars; it’s essential that the team are able to hold their own in remote locations. “Physical fitness is important to us,” Porter says. “The areas we work in are typically very hot and humid. Frequently, you’ll have to hike between seven and 10 miles [11-15km] with one of these rucksacks. You have to be able to operate without bringing the team down.”
Porter says illnesses among the teams themselves are rare – which is not to say operations are risk-free. “We went to Nepal after the 2015 earthquake,” he recalls. “We had a team of 45 on the ground when the second earthquake occurred. They removed themselves from the building, did accountability, let us know that they were safe, then pressed on. In general, we’ve either been pretty safe or pretty lucky.”
A cause for optimism
When The Red Bulletin visit in early December 2019, Team Rubicon have just deployed a unit to the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific to assist with the ongoing dengue fever epidemic, and are also searching their volunteer base for medical providers who can fly out to Samoa at the behest of the WHO to help tackle a measles outbreak.
The organisation have also been on the front line of the Australian wildfires, a crisis that has – at time of writing – seen more than 17m hectares of bushland razed, around 6,000 buildings destroyed, and as many as 32 people (including volunteer firefighters) killed. In 2019, the Australian wildfire season began in late August/early September – a full three months earlier than usual. Since then, the fire threat has been near-constant, with Team Rubicon Australia (TRA) first invited by the Office for Emergency Management to respond to fires in Rappville in northern New South Wales back in October. Its work is primarily focused on debris and tree removal at locations across NSW.
“In the last four months, we’ve conducted more operations than in the preceding three years,” says TRA CEO Geoff Evans.
A thank you
© Team Rubicon
The team were then awaiting the go-ahead to deploy to Victoria and southern NSW, where fires still raged. “The authorities in Victoria and New South Wales are delaying our deployment to these areas due to the ongoing risk, and, more importantly, so that they may vector us on to the hardest-hit areas, some of which may yet be to come,” says Evans.
In Australia, the challenge will be maintaining on-the-ground support across three areas of operation, as well as managing the psychological toll endured by homeowners, many of whom, Evans says, have “lost all hope”.
People need something to rally around when things are so chaotic
Despite this, from Australia to Dallas, the company’s ethos is one of optimism, of finding hope in the chaos. Porter recalls being dispatched to Moore, Oklahoma, in the aftermath of the 2013 tornado: “In one of the neighbourhoods, there was a tree at the end of a cul-de-sac. The tornado came through and ripped all of the leaves off, so all that was left were the trunk and the branches; everything else around it was flattened. But then somebody took an American flag and nailed it to the tree, and that became a central [focus] point. People need something to rally around when things are so chaotic.”
For Porter, it’s moments like this that make Team Rubicon’s work so important. “Where there’s a need, we try to fill it. The best thing about the job for me is knowing we’re making a difference,” he says. “100 years from now, people will be writing books on the things we’ve done.
