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10 days after quake, 2 rescued from Haiti rubble
Man survived by drinking his own urine
- AP
- Published: 09:45 January 23, 2010
- Image Credit: AP
- A member of the MA1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team holds a child who was injured in last week's massive earthquake in Port-au-Prince.
Port-Au-Prince: A search team pulled a severely dehydrated 21-year-old man from the rubble of his bedroom a staggering 10 days after an earthquake leveled much of the Haitian capital.
Emmannuel Buso was so ghostly pale that rescuers said his mother thought he was a corpse.
However, doctors found him in relatively good shape despite his ordeal and he is expected to make a full recovery.
Buso said from his bed in an Israeli Defense Forces field hospital near Haiti's main airport that he survived by drinking his own urine and spent most of his time under the debris in a listless daze, at times dreaming of his mother and thinking that he had in fact died.
"I am here today because God wants it," Buso said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Teams have been searching for survivors in the tropical heat following the 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12.
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Elsewhere Friday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, according to doctors administering oxygen and intravenous fluids to her at the General Hospital. Doctors said she was in critical condition.
The United Nations said on Saturday that Haiti's government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over.
At least 132 people have been pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams since the January 12 disaster, according to the UN's humanitarian coordination office
In its latest report on the situation in Haiti, the UN said the government has confirmed 111,481 confirmed deaths in four parts of the country.
Much of the focus of the quake's aid workers has shifted to helping the hundreds of thousands of newly homeless in the impoverished nation and some rescue crews have started to depart because of the time since the quake.
Maj. Amir Ben David, the head of the Israeli search-and-rescue team that found Buso, said he has never seen anyone survive as long as Buso under such circumstances. He said the rescue is a reminder of the importance of continuing their efforts.
"This has given us a lot of hope that we can find more people," Ben David told AP. "We will keep going until the end of our mission."
Video of the rescue obtained by the AP shows rescue workers pulling the man, shirtless and covered in dust, from a crevasse in the wreckage of his family's two-story home in the Bel-Air section of the city near downtown.
Members of the rescue team pulled away some debris, called out to him and, to everyone's surprise, he responded.
Buso, a slender student and tailor with deep-set eyes, said he had just come out of the shower when the quake hit.
"I felt the house dancing around me," he said from his bed, covered by a reflective heat blanket in the hospital field tent. "I didn't know if I was up or down."
He passed out and lay in a daze, dreaming at times that he could hear his mother crying. The furniture in his room had collapsed around him in such a way that it created a small space for him amid the ruins of the house. He had no food. When he got desperately thirsty, he drank his urine.
"I was very scared," he said. "My heart was jumping."
Buso said his mother is living in a huge encampment of refugees from the quake across from the wrecked National Palace. He plans to join her there when he is released from the hospital.
Capt. Kheir Ashraf, the doctor who treated Buso, said he has no doubts about the man was buried since the quake. But he also said Buso is in remarkably good health. "He is in good condition and he will recover," Ashraf said.
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