Against all odds, Haiti quake survivors still being found

Port-au-Prince: She had already spent three days under the rubble, and by the time rescuers pulled the woman from the crumpled home, they told her crying relatives to dump her broken body with the other corpses on the sidewalk.

The family protested: She deserved better.

So a Mexican rescue worker leaned over and felt 19-year-old Josyanne Petidelle's throat. He looked up at her relatives.

"She's alive", he shouted. "She's alive!"

Against increasingly high odds, search teams and rescue workers around Port-au-Prince found more victims still breathing under the rubble and collapsed concrete on Friday, the fourth day of recovery efforts after a devastating magnitude-7.0 quake that toppled countless homes and buildings.

Digging out

British firefighters pulled a two-year-old girl from a fallen building on Friday. Seven people were freed from the Montana Hotel Thursday night and Friday — including four Americans who were up and walking soon after being hauled from the wreckage.

Even an Australian television crew got in on the rescue efforts, digging out a healthy 16-month-old girl from beneath her destroyed hillside home about 68 hours after Tuesday's earthquake. The crew was about to film an interview when neighbours, and reporters heard the toddler's cries.

"We had to break some walls," said David Celestino of the Dominican Republic, who was working with the TV crew. "We had a big hammer, we made a hole and she came out to the light. She basically walked out to me."

Experts say people trapped by the quake and without access to water will soon die.

"Beyond three or four days without water, they'll be pretty ill," said Dr Michael VanRooyen of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in Boston. "Around three days would be where you would see people start to succumb."

Petidelle was discovered amid the sad resignation and stench of rotting bodies in the downtown neighbourhood of Carrefour-Feuille. Her rescue sent shudders of excitement and hope running down the street, where crowds flocked to congratulate themselves on what they viewed as just short of a miracle.

Petidelle's father, boyfriend and neighbours had dug frantically for three hours after hearing shouts from under a collapsed concrete house.

When they finally reached Petidelle, they found her motionless, with her dress tattered and her skin bruised and caked in white dust.