RESCUES:STORIES OF lives shattered by Tuesday's earthquake continue to pour out – alongside remarkable tales of survival.
Frank Thorp, an American aid worker, was in the mountains 100 miles away when the quake hit. He rushed back to the city to find his wife, Jillian, trapped in rubble, with just her hand poking out.
“We had to pull bricks and bricks and bricks and wood and doors and metal away for at least an hour before we were able to get her and her co-worker out. She was in there for 10 hours. It was such a relief to get her out. It was an extremely emotional time.
“Jillian is doing okay. She has some major bruises and she’s having a hard time walking.
Estonian Tarmo Joveer (35) was freed from the rubble of the UN’s five-storey headquarters in Port-au-Prince early yesterday, where at least 22 members of UN staff have been killed and about 100 are still missing.
One US rescuer, Mike Davis, said a 15-strong team spent five hours using a jackhammer and buckets to take away the rubble that had trapped Mr Joveer, a UN security worker. Rescuers had to climb down two or three storeys of debris to reach him.
Médecins sans Frontières aid worker Danielle Trepanier was rescued on Wednesday afternoon after almost 24 hours under the rubble of a collapsed staff house.
An MSF spokesman said: “Trepanier fell through two floors and landed in a small space in the basement, under a mass of debris. Locally hired MSF drivers were among those who risked their own safety to rescue Danielle from the basement, knowing from her intermittent cries for help that hope was not lost.”
Meanwhile, amid such devastation was a story of hope.
In the hours following the quake, Brazilian military doctors helped a Haitian mother give birth inside their army base.
Capt Fabricio Almeida de Moura, an army doctor who is co- ordinating an improvised field hospital in the Haitian capital, said that “the scare from the quake meant she went into labour early”.
On the verge of giving birth, the woman was carried through the barbed wire confines of Camp Charlie, a sprawling military base near the US embassy where more than 1,000 Brazilian troops live inside air-conditioned shipping containers. – (Guardian service)