Haiti survivor pulled out of rubble
Rescue teams bring out trapped man 11 days after deadly quake flattened buildings.
Coke and biscuits
Taking shelter under his desk as the rubble began to fall, he survived lying on his back and drinking cola and biscuits. “I would eat anything I found, after the quake I didn’t know when it was day and when it was night.”
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Jean Elie, Jean-Pierre’s brother, heard tapping from the ruins of the Hotel Napoli Inn where he had been searching daily for him, after dreaming that he was alive.
“Today is the first time we communicated with him,” Jean Elie said. “He asked for us to save him. God has been keeping him alive.”
Hospital workers said Jean-Pierre, who had been working as a cashier in the hotel’s grocery store, was fine but thirsty.
Jean Elie added he was disappointed at the government’s decision to disband rescue operations, as more people were likely to be trapped alive.
Death toll
On Friday, an Israeli rescue team freed a 22-year-old man from the rubble, who even managed to limp away despite suffering from dehydration. An 84-year old woman was the second survivor pulled out alive that day.
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| Haitian survivors continue to abandon capital city. |
“She was barely responding [when rescued], she had wounds all over her body, and maggots,” Vladimir Larouche, a Haitian-American doctor from New York who treated her, said. “I treated her and made her stable. The [US] army evacuated her to a boat.”
Nevertheless, Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs, said: “Hope is vanishing now, though we could still have miracles.”
Last week, Haitian officials confirmed that the death toll from the January 12 earthquake stands at over 110,000, with 193,000 more people wounded and another 609,000 forced into temporary shelters.
Following the toll revision, the US Geographical Survey said on Saturday that the quake was possibly the most destructive on record in the region.
“It’s probably accurate [to say] that this is the most deadly quake to occur in this part of the world,” Dale Grant, a geophysicist at the Geographic Survey told the AFP news agency.
I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it in this area.”