I’m in Christchurch this week and for those of you that don’t know,had a catastrophic earthquake in Feb 2011 and is now on the road to rebuild and recovery.

One of the interesting anecdotes I heard from a friend, was how the search and rescue teams used a visual standard to communicate the status of the building searches.

Note that at the time of the earthquake, a number of international teams descended upon poor Christchurch in a coordinated disaster recovery program, in order to save and preserve the lives of those people potentially trapped in collapsed building.

So how the visual system works, is that when the search and rescue team enter a building, they spray paint or “tag” the entrance giving their country, date, time and a square to say they are in the building. once they have completed the search, they spray a circle on top of the original tag to show that they have completed their work