An Israeli 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.
PHOTO: EPA
“I am here today because God wants it,” Buso said in an interview.
The Israeli team is one of a number of such groups that have been searching countless destroyed buildings in the tropical heat following the 7.0-magnitude quake on Jan. 12.
Elsewhere on Friday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, doctors administering oxygen and intravenous fluids to her at the General Hospital said. Doctors said she was in critical condition.
However, Haiti’s government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over, the UN said yesterday, saying there was little hope of finding more people alive 10 days after much of the capital was reduced to rubble.
Spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said she was unable to comment on the rescue reports, but she said the government’s Friday afternoon decision didn’t mean rescue teams still searching for survivors would be stopped from carrying out whatever work they felt necessary.
“It doesn’t mean the government will order them to stop. In case there is the slightest sign of life, they will act,” she told reporters.
She added, however: “Except for miracles, hope is unfortunately fading.”
The European Commission says international rescue crews have rescued more than 130 people since the earthquake struck, but successes have grown increasingly rare as more time passes.
Major Amir Ben David, the head of the Israeli search-and-rescue team, said he has never seen anyone survive as long as Buso under such circumstances.
Video of the rescue 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.
“Way to go,” one of the rescuers yells in Hebrew.
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