Hundreds of Haitians cheered, wept and gave thanks to God last night as a 16-year-old girl was pulled from beneath the rubble of her house, 15 days after the earthquake.
Daline Etienne was barely alive with very low blood pressure, but medics with the French rescue team that saved her were confident that she would pull through. Her rescuers thought that she might have survived on Coca-Cola.
“It’s a joy, it’s a miracle. Everyone is rejoicing,” said Bertony Daudier, one of the huge crowd that gathered to watch the drama unfold in the San Gérard district of Port-au-Prince.
The incredible story began at around midday when four men searching for possessions in the ruins of a house heard a noise in the wreckage beneath them. “We shouted, ‘Is anyone there? Is someone there?’,” Rousvelt Luc said. “We heard a voice saying, ‘Yes, yes’.”
The French rescue team arrived at about 5pm and embarked on a race to extract Daline before nightfall. She was trapped beneath a huge concrete slab in her pancaked house, with the stench of decomposing bodies permeating the air.
Claude Fuilla, the chief medic on the French rescue team, said that when they arrived at the site he climbed down into a hole. “At first all I could see was her hair,” he said.
They widened the tunnel for better access to examine her. “We tried to stabilise her before we did anything else because she couldn’t hold on for many more hours if we took too long to get her out,” Mr Fuilla said. Her rescuers managed to put her on a drip.
At about 5.45pm, as the sun was setting, they pulled her out to the elation of a crowd that has known nothing but misery for the past fortnight. As they cheered and applauded, she was carried over the rubble on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance.
She did not move and she was covered in dust and looked almost lifeless. Commander Samuel Bernes, of the rescue team, said: “She just said, ‘Thank you’. She’s very weak, which suggests that she’s been there for 15 days.”
“It’s a miracle. God has watched over her and Jesus got her out,” Mr Fuilla said.
Daline was rushed to the Hôpital Lycée Français where doctors opted to fly her by helicopter to a French naval ship off the coast of Haiti for treatment. Michel Orcel, a doctor at the hospital, said: “We can’t explain how she survived all that time. She is going to live. There is no doubt.” He said that she appeared to have no more than a few cuts on her legs.
Mr Fuilla said that there were three reasons why Daline might have survived: she was young and in good health; she seemed to have been protected in a cavity by a wall on each side; and she seemed to have had access to liquid. Mr Fuilla said that she had mumbled the word “Coca” — French for Coca-Cola.
Within minutes of an ambulance rushing Daline off to hospital, darkness fell but the crowd lingered, anxious to savour a rare moment of joy that will boost the spirits of a city where more than 150,000 people have died, 1.5 million are homeless and an estimated 50 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
Source:The Times
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