Rescuers on Wednesday dragged a Haitian girl alive from the rubble 15 days after a devastating quake, in a rare moment of joy for a country where victims still face a desperate shortage of aid.
A French search team saved 16-year-old Darlene Etienne after neighbors heard a voice in the debris of a house in Port-au-Prince, ending what appeared to be the longest ordeal of any survivor so far following the Jan. 12 disaster.
“She just said ‘thank you,’ she’s very weak, which suggests that she’s been there for 15 days,” Commander Samuel Bernes of the rescue team said.
Colonel Michel Orcel, a doctor at the field hospital where Etienne was treated, said the girl was happy after her dramatic rescue.
“She is 16 years old, she is alive and she has her whole life ahead of her. She was speaking, she said that she was happy,” Orcel said. “She was worried about her friends, but we weren’t able to answer all her questions.”
International rescue teams have saved around 135 people who were buried alive when the 7.0-magnitude quake laid waste to the capital and several other towns in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
The last was a 31-year-old man rescued by a US team on Tuesday, although he was thought to have been entombed by a powerful aftershock around two days after the initial tremor struck.
Haitian President Rene Preval said “nearly 170,000” bodies had now been counted since the quake, significantly higher than previous estimates of 150,000.
“In 15 days many efforts have been made. The National Equipment Company has made great efforts in removing nearly 170,000 dead from the streets and clearing the roadways to facilitate traffic,” Preval told a press conference.
Preval suggested Haiti’s legislative elections due next month would have to be postponed because of the quake.
“I don’t think the time is right to hold elections now given the conditions in which people are living,” Preval said. “However, we must speak to the other protagonists and reach a consensus on this issue.”
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