 Clearly, this is a catastrophic event. As Mexico continues to grapple with the largest earthquake to hit the region since 1985, California's top emergency manager talks about the challenges facing first responders in Mexico. That's up next on this special edition of Inside Look. Thanks for joining us. The last several weeks have proven to be among the busiest ever from many of California's search and rescue teams from hurricanes to flash floods and now a catastrophic earthquake in Mexico. California urban search and rescue teams have seen it all, and each time they get deployed, the person sending them out the door is Mark Gilarducci, the director of California's Office of Emergency Services. Director Gilarducci has decades of experience with these search and rescue teams between having his own boots on the ground at multiple devastating earthquakes around the world as well as leading the search and rescue efforts in the Oklahoma City bombing. Gilarducci knows firsthand what the first responders in Mexico are facing over the coming days, weeks and months. We took a few moments today to get his thoughts on search and rescue operations and the challenges faced in these catastrophic disasters. So Mark, thanks for joining us. I know you've been watching like all of us, the coverage of this devastating earthquake in Mexico. You have a lot of experience in dealing with disasters and rescue efforts. Can you just share your thoughts on what Mexico is and will be going through in their recovery efforts? Well, obviously, well, first of all, such a traumatic event and our hearts and prayers and thoughts go out to the people in Mexico City and the region. These situations are very, very challenging for rescuers because you've got all this concrete debris, the way that the buildings collapse creates the potential with aftershocks for a secondary collapse. So it's going to be very, very important for these rescue folks to try to, first of all, pinpoint where victims may be located and then build the strategy by which they're going to go in, shore up the building or the area that they're working so that if there is an aftershock or a secondary collapse, it doesn't injure rescuers or kill rescuers and in essence, basically deconstruct that building to get into where those victims are located. Mark, we're seeing the images of hundreds, if not thousands of people who are helping to locate and rescue people trapped in some of the damaged buildings. Everyone wants to help, but what challenges are the first responders facing? Well, it is a challenge because of the aftershock potential. The way that the earthquakes occur there, the waves of the earthquake really attenuate greater within Mexico City sort of sits into a bowl and it's just the way the geography is that those aftershocks can be much stronger and they can actually have a greater effect on maybe not just not only the buildings that are already collapsed where they're doing rescue operations but may result in new collapses in the area. So there's a lot of people out rescuing, there's citizen volunteers, there's a lot of resources there. They need to be very, very careful about the potential for other collapses that are going on in the area and of course that will result in more injuries. It's tough to think about people who have been trapped now for over two days. How long can they survive in these types of situations? Well, this is really a big question and look, we have seen rescues in previous cases up to three weeks, live rescues that have been made. You've seen it in earthquakes like in Haiti, we've seen certainly earthquakes in other parts of the country. Even here in California, we've had earthquakes where we have had to do rescues and we've actually been able to rescue people up to a week after maybe trapped. This is really important. You have to understand that when buildings collapse, they create what's called a void space. These are livable spaces or survivable spaces and you need to do diligence and be able to get and do as much search operations using search dogs, using other kinds of technologies to be able to try to clear buildings and the window can be, depending on the number of people, the type of structure can be several weeks before we can actually say that search and rescue operations would be concluded. Alright, Mark, thank you very much for your time today and that will do it for this special edition of Inside Look for All of Us here at Cal OES. I'm Brian May. Thanks for watching. Visit our online newsroom at OESNews.com to learn more about this program and get the latest news and information from our team. Don't miss our next video on your Facebook timeline, like our page and you'll get the latest posts as they happen. If you're an Instagram user, you can see the latest snapshots by following our Cal OES Instagram account and Twitter users can get instant access to our tweets from across the state by following Cal OES.