A lot seems to have depended on a number of things including how nourished they were (for those who lay buried for days) at the time of the earthquake. It also depended on where and how they fell. Those without five floors of concrete falling on top of them had a better chance of survival.This is the only way to describe how some survived areas such as guest rooms or the lobby, while others known to be in the same area perished.
Those who survived have a long way to go in terms of healing. They are left with survivor-guilt complex. "Why did I survive and my dear friend die", post traumatic stress syndrome that may remain with them for many years.
I wish and I pray that each survivor is able to heal and realize they survived while others didn't because it was not their time to die yet.
Melissa Elliot
Melissa was part of Lynn University's "Journey of Hope" which had arrived in Haiti the day before the earthquake.
The students and staff had returned to Hotel Montana at 3:30 pm after spending the day with orphans and students in Port au Prince. Seven of the students decided to hang out at the pool writing in journals to be shared with the others over dinner. The two faculty members headed for the gym. The other students went to their rooms to rest before dinner.
Melissa was among the students who chose to go to their rooms. She had just left the bathroom and was walking between the two beds in her room when the building suddenly collapsed around her. She managed to grab her purse and a sheet off one of the beds before crawling through a hole leading into the adjacant guest room. Following light she crawled through the rubble, ending up outside under what had been the roof.
Melissa ended up in what had been the driveway where she saw some of the Lynn Students gathered together.
"I wasn't trapped. I was able to climb to the next room and then jump down and crawl underneath the roof. But my legs are all bruised and scratched up, and I have some bruises on my upper body," Elliott explained.
At first, Melissa and her classmates from Lynn University thought a bomb had gone off. In the hours that followed, they saw some horrific things.
"There were tremors throughout the whole entire night, and you could just hear the whole city down underneath us, screaming. You were walking over bodies, it was horrible. People were just sitting there, crying. They had nowhere to go. Every building was destroyed," Elliott said.
With only one working cell phone, Melissa and her friends weren't able to get in touch with their families for days. Food and water were scarce.
"We had to stay strong because we needed to survive. We didn't want to be there any longer than we were," Elliott said.
Melissa plans to rest with her family before going back to school in Florida. She can't stop thinking about the four students and two teachers from her humanitarian group who are still missing.were killed in the earthquake.
"It replays in my mind every second, but right now I'm just trying to be strong and focus all of our effort into bringing the rest of the group back safely," Elliott said.
Melissa is asking people to continue to donate to the relief efforts.
When asked if she would return to Haiti to continue her humanitarian work, she said, "in a heartbeat."
~~~~~
Nadine Cardoso-Reidl after being rescued
Nadine Cardoso-Reidl,the German co-owner of the Montana Hotel sent an SMS message to her son to get help to drag her out of the earthquake rubble.
She spent four days in the debris of the Montana Hotel, used by foreign tourists and officials, until she was rescued in the early hours of Sunday.
Mark Stone, with the Virginia team, said that even though his team and a French crew had cut holes in the mass of concrete using jackhammers, concrete saws, metal saws and picks, much of the devastated six-story hotel could not be searched/
Two years ago, the hotel was assaulted by a skilled and heavily armed team of bandits. Nobody was killed, and Ms. Cardoso cleaned up and carried on.
The unbreakable Ms. Cardoso, 62, showed her remarkable resilience again, when she was pulled from the wreckage of her own hotel on January 17th. She was the last survivor to be dug out from the rubbles.Standing in the lobby when the earthquake struck, Ms. Cardoso survived 4 ½ days beneath five floors of rubble with just minor injuries.
"She's died several times for me now. After all the emotions going high and low, you start to get numb," Mr. Riedl said moments after getting word she was in fine form and about to be freed. He'd been told earlier in the week that his wife was dead.
"It's a miracle. It's amazing. She's indestructible."
During her kidnapping five years ago, Ms. Cardoso's captors beat her and gave her injections, including blood they claimed was contaminated with HIV.
Mr. Riedl eventually paid an undisclosed ransom to get her out.
She suffered psychological aftereffects, he said, but has been well in recent years, he said.
"She's a tough cookie," Mr. Riedl said.
Ms. Cardoso is one of a few survivors to emerge form the hotel since an early flurry of rescues in the two days following the quake.
With the one-week mark approaching, there is little hope left for several Canadians believed buried beneath the concrete slabs.
Ms. Cardoso's son, Sylvain, told rescuers Saturday afternoon he could hear his mother.
They dug a shaft down, confirming her presence, before cutting her lose 12 hours later in the early morning hours yesterday.
She was dehydrated but otherwise fine.
Sadly, the Cardoso-Reidl's 7 year old grandson Aile Stefanson did not survive
The woman was said to be badly dehydrated but otherwise in good condition.Sadly her 7 year old grandson, Aile Stefenson did not survive.
~~~~~
John Scarborough was meeting with his associate Joseph Guercia, on the fifth floor of the Hotel Montana when the shaking began.
"They were having a conversation when the earthquake hit and the roof caved in," Renee Guercia said. "John called out for my dad and there was no response."
Scarborough -- knocked unconscious -- was later rescued from the rubble of the hotel and airlifted to Miami.
Dan Wooley, of Colorado Springs speaks of how he and coworker David Hames (Compassion International) arrived in Haiti on Jan. 10th and had just returned to the hotel after filming children in Port au Prince. They were there for the Compassion's Child Survivor Program.
“I just saw the walls rippling and just explosive sounds all around me,” Woolley said. “It all happened incredibly fast. David yelled out, ‘It’s an earthquake,’ and we both lunged and everything turned dark.”
Dan lunged for an elevator shaft for protection where he wrote notes to his two young boys and his wife.
“I always wanted to survive, but I knew that was something that I couldn’t control. So I decided if I had to go, I wanted to leave some last notes for them,” Woolley said. Opening the book and fighting his emotions, he read an entry he addressed to his sons, Josh, 6, and Nathan, 3:
“I was in a big accident. Don’t be upset at God. He always provides for his children, even in hard times. I’m still praying that God will get me out, but He may not. But He will always take care of you.”
Woolley had taken refuge in an elevator shaft, where he used an iPhone first-aid app to treat a compound fracture of his leg and a cut on his head. He had already used his digital SLR camera’s focusing light to illuminate his surroundings, and taken pictures of the wreckage to help find a safe place to wait to be rescued — or to die.
Writing the notes to his wife and children wasn’t easy, the deeply religious man said.
“Boy, I cried,” he admitted. “Obviously, no one wants to come to that point. I also didn’t want to just get found after having some time — God gave me some time — to think and to pray and to come to grips with the reality. I wanted to use that time to do everything I could for my family. If that could be surviving, get out, then I would. If it could be just to leave some notes that would help them in life, I would do that.”
Woolley had been working for Compassion International, a mission organization, making a film about the impact of poverty on the people of Haiti. He and a colleague, David Hames, had just returned to the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince from a day of filming when the earthquake struck.
Awaiting his fate
Woolley is nearsighted and lost his glasses in the quake. But by using the focusing light on his camera and taking pictures, he was able to figure out where he was and where to go. And thanks to the iPhone first-aid app he’d downloaded, he knew how to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound. The app also warned him not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cell phone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes.
~~~~~
NO PHOTO AVAILABLE
Mondesir Luckson - Hotel Montana Bellhop
At the hotel, rescue workers pull out a bellhop and a U.S. charity worker from elevator shafts after nearly 65 hours. They had talked constantly, encouraging each other while entombed in the dark.
About 9 a.m. Friday,January 15, 2010, Virginia Task Force One, out of Fairfax County, pulled Haitian bellhop Mondesir Luckson from a crumbled elevator shaft in the upscale Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince.
Luckson drank some water, ate some food and talked about how he could hear other people trapped in the rubble. At first there were eight voices, he said, then there were only six.
An hour later, the search team hauled out American Daniel Woolley, an Internet program manager with the Christian charity group Compassion International, from another elevator shaft.
Luckson ran to Woolley as he was being carried out on a stretcher, placed his hand on his cheek and introduced himself.
"Hey Luckson!" Woolley said in a raspy voice. "Good to meet you, man! Let me get your address."
Luckson said the two of them talked constantly while entombed in the dark and the dust for nearly 65 hours, praying and urging each other not to get discouraged.
"He is married and had two boys," Luckson said. "He kept saying, 'I just want to see my family and wife' " in Colorado.
Luckson said he didn't know yet what had happened to his family.
John Scarborough was meeting with an associate, Joseph Guercia, on the fifth floor of the Hotel Montana when the shaking began.
They were having a conversation when the earthquake hit and the roof caved in. John called out for Joe and there was no response.
Scarborough -- knocked unconscious -- was later rescued from the rubble of the hotel and airlifted to Miami.
"It's but the grace of God that I got out," quake survivor John Scarborough said."I called out to Joe Guercia as I was getting out. The last stuff … the last thing I heard out of … out of Joe … is just that … 'Oh!' That was it," Scarborough said.
Scarborough, 70, woke up covered in rubble. He said he saw a spark of light and managed to slowly work his way out. But he couldn't find Joe before he was flown to Miami for treatment. Sadly, Mr. Guercia did not survive.
Paul-Emile Arsenault, 58, a near-retired career bureaucrat in Quebec’s finance ministry advising its Haitian equivalent on reforms, had just arrived for another work trip, along with colleague Nicholas Mazellier.
Air Canada Flight 950 landed at 2:30; passengers arrive at hotel at 4:30; earthquake strikes just before 5. For the many Canadians staying at the Hotel Montana, which in large part collapsed, this chronology proved decisive.
On the way down, they befriended Anne Chabot and Anne Labelle and waited for the women at Haiti’s airport so they could all go to the hotel together. The group stopped to buy water before arriving at the hotel. As the two women had a meeting to go to, the men let them check in first.
Arsenault was in his room on the fifth floor when the violent tremors began.
He stayed near the door, thinking that would be safer. The façade of the hotel tumbled down, and the entire floor collapsed several stories.
Somehow, Arsenault was still alive. He looked himself over: he wasn’t even injured. There was a narrow passage in front of him and he could see light at the end of this concrete tunnel. He tried to squeeze through but it was too small. He was trapped.
“I called for help, and certain people responded, but not right away,” he says. “I knew there were other people worse off than me.”
Later in the evening, a man from the Canadian International Development Agency was calling out to the debris, asking if there were any Canadians alive within.
Arsenault stuck his nose out and responded. The man gave him water and told him he’d return with rescuers in the morning. He checked in on Arsenault during the night.
As promised, the man returned in the morning with Chilean peacekeepers, who helped free Arsenault. It was a few hours before he found Mazellier, who was injured.
“We were happy to see each other,” Arsenault recalls. “We cried.”
Arsenault had no shoes, so he took Mazellier’s and started helping carry patients to a United Nations helicopter.
Chabot and Labelle weren’t as lucky.
“I can’t explain why I was able to get out and others not,” Arsenault says. “I can say I was very lucky. But the questions without answers can be troubling. How did I get out in the best shape? I was the oldest of the group. And my children are big. And it wasn’t my first mission in Haiti. The others, the two women, it was their first mission. They were young.”
Guylaine Tardif and Jacques Desilets home seems a world away from the desolation of Haiti’s capital city. It’s at the foot of a ski hill in Bromont, Que., surrounded by birch trees and visited by deer.
The earthquake survivors were relieved to get back. But when Desilets brought home a bag of cherries, the sight of them reduced Tardif to tears. They seemed an outrageous extravagance.
“All this luxury — it was too much,” says Tardif, 47. “I said, `Okay, I have to work on myself and I have to change this feeling of powerlessness. I need to do something to help.’ ”
It was the first time that Tardif, a graphic designer, had followed her partner on a job. Desilets, 60, was in Haiti to help the government set up vocational training programs — a project funded by the Montreal-based Consortium for International Development in Education.
The couple travelled with only carry-on luggage, got through customs quickly, and arrived at the Hotel Montana shortly after 3:30 p.m. Desilets had a meeting with a colleague in another wing of the hotel. Tardif thought of taking a shower but decided to tag along instead and meet the colleague’s wife.
Ten minutes after they walked into their colleague’s ground-floor room, a terrible shaking sent both couples sprawling to the floor. Tardif looked out a window and saw slabs of concrete fall.
"The dust in the room got so thick “you couldn’t see six inches in front of you,” Desilets recalls. They called out names to find each other. The foursome stumbled out of the room and made their way to the front of the hotel. To their horror, much of it had collapsed, including the section where their room had been.
“It was a vision of the end of the world,” Tardif says.
From the valley below came a rising clamour of desperate voices, like nothing Desilets had ever heard.
“Everyone was saying, `Help me,’ `What is going on?’ `Thank you God .....I’m still alive.’ ”
At Montreal’s airport, an official gathered the survivors and had them fill out the standard customs declaration form. Desilets shook his head at the absurdity of imposing the procedure on people who returned with only the shirts on their backs.
Desilets is preparing to go back to Haiti to continue his project. Tardif, after struggling with nightmares, is trying to make sense of her experience. And she’s being tough on herself. She’s troubled by her reaction to the Haitian generosity she encountered, including the boy who gave them water. She initially thought he had stolen it from the hotel.
“I didn’t receive the generosity for what it was,” she says, sitting in her sun-drenched dining room. “I was wary.
“Jean-Luc, the man who led us towards the embassy, he generously offered to take us when everyone said the road was blocked. I kept asking myself, `Why are we following this man? We don’t know him.’ I was wary, I didn’t freely receive his generosity, and that touched me very much,” she adds, fighting back tears.”
“He could have just taken care of his own family. And the young boy could have brought the water to his family instead. They could not have given a damn about white people standing in front of a hotel waiting for help. They needed help too.
“Jacques asked Jean-Luc why he was doing this,” Tardif continues. “He said, `Well, if I was in Canada I would hope someone would do this for me.’ It was that simple.
“I give money to groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres. I still want to do that, but I also want to do something concrete to help people. That’s how all this has changed me.”
Nicolas Mazellier
Nicolas Mazellier was buried alive.
What remained of the fifth floor and roof of the Montana Hotel was on top of him. He lay on his side, his left leg crushed by a cement pillar. He could barely move his hands. During the day, a sliver of light pierced the darkness from somewhere beyond his head. The screams of the dying faded as the hours ticked by.
“It was like being in a coffin,” says Mazellier, 38.
“I alternated between moments of peace and prayer, when I put myself in the hands of God, and moments of profound desperation.”
Mazellier was one of four Quebec government employees sent to Haiti to train civil servants. Two in his group, information technology specialists Anne Chabot and Anne Labelle, died in the rubble of the Montana Hotel. The other, Paul-Emile Arsenault, survived.
Born in Briancon, a town in the French Alps, Mazellier had the task of helping Haiti’s government reform the way it structures its national budget.
He walked into hotel room 409 at 4.30 pm. Twenty-three minutes later, the ground shook, and Mazellier staggered toward the sliding doors that led to the balcony. He says his wing of the hotel collapsed in just four seconds.
“You feel completely lost, completely powerless,” Mazellier says. “Then everything starts falling and falling, as if you’re in an elevator. I could see the trees and scenery out the window, and at the same time I was falling.
“I went from the fourth floor to the first in a fraction of a second. I had time to put my hands to my head. I remember that I said, `No,’ that I said, `Maman,’ and then I was thrown to the floor and I found myself buried in a kind of concrete coffin.”
He says that if his head had been thrown a little more to the right or left, it would have been crushed.
Mazellier is a religious and thoughtful man. In his home in Stoneham, a village north of Quebec City, he has a picture of himself meeting the late Pope John Paul II. Yet, while trapped in the ruins, he at times wished the aftershocks would kill him.
“It must be difficult for my family to hear that,” says Mazellier, who has a young son. “But you feel such sadness. You have no control over what is happening; you’re caught there under the rubble and you don’t know when it is going to end.”
He prayed, he shouted, he whistled loudly, he banged a ceramic tile against a metal tube. He thought of his colleagues, his family, and the many Haitians he realized must have perished in the quake. He lost all sense of time.
At one point, he managed to free his leg. He heard people walking above him. He shouted and they shouted back. The rescuers, a team from Ecuador, started digging. An hour later, he felt someone tie a rope to his ankles and pull him out. His 17-hour ordeal was over.
“And there I was, in the sun with that blue sky and the birds and an incredible silence. And a desperation, a desolation — we felt the presence of death.”
He was evacuated to Montreal on a Canadian military plane within 48 hours. The muscles of his leg were badly crushed but no bones were broken. He walks gingerly around his home with a cane, trying to make sense of it all.
“It’s a little bit like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, who lost his sight and found it later,” he says. “I’m still blind. I haven’t yet understood the magnitude of what happened.
“People tell me, `It wasn’t your time; you still have things to do here.’ But it’s difficult to accept that it was the time of others.”
Mazellier says he now sees his life in terms of three decisive dates: his birth on Aug. 19, 1971, the Haiti quake on Jan.12, 2010, and the date to come of his death. He calls Haiti his third homeland, after France and Canada. He is determined to help rebuild the country any way he can.
“I’m conscious of the luck that I had and of the responsibility I now have, because I survived and others died. This experience has to make me a better person.
“What’s important is not that we talk about my little troubles, but that Canadians understand that four hours away by plane there is a country that is in ruins.”
The cries also came from the rubble in front of them, where many were buried alive. “There was nothing we could do,” Tardif says.
Night fell. A young Haitian boy gave them water. The couple then decided to walk to the Canadian embassy. A tall, thin Haitian named Jean-Luc showed them the way. Within 48 hours, they were evacuated to Montreal.
Martin Turgeon made many trips to Haiti over the last dozen years.Routine, routine, routine.
This trip to Haiti was just one more of the many Martin Turgeon has taken over the last dozen years. The head of a business information technology consulting firm based in Boisbriand, north of Montreal, Turgeon was travelling to Haiti to meet with clients. On flight 950 with him was his employee, Alexandre Bitton.
The flight was relatively smooth. Turgeon, 42, grumbled a bit about not being in business class, as he normally would be. But he was thankful for his emergency exit row. At least he could stretch out his 6-foot-4 frame.
He watched an Adam Sandler movie on the seat-back TV. He read a bit from his crime thriller novel. He chatted with the flight attendants, whom he has come to know well over the years.
Routine.
He ate a Quizno’s sandwich on board. It was “terrible.” It would be his last big meal for four days.
Turgeon and Bitton, 36, arrived at the Hotel Montana and checked in. Turgeon made a quick trip to his room on the fourth floor and immediately came back down.
He could think of nothing better than a nice, cold beer. He went to the bar outside. Suddenly, the ground began to shift -- as much as three metres, he says.
Everything shook. Instinctively, he took about five steps backwards. And before his eyes, the restaurant roof collapsed, about one metre from him.
“Fifteen seconds more and I wouldn’t be here,” he says. For 10 minutes he was in a cloud of dust. He couldn’t see anything. But when it started to settle, what was revealed was a glimpse of apocalypse.
The hotel was destroyed. He thought about Bitton, who he knew was still inside.
He took out his cellphone and called his wife, Nancy Savage, back in Montreal. He knew this would soon be all over the news.
“I told her there’d been a catastrophe and not to worry because I wasn’t even scratched,” he says.
That night, everyone stayed near the hotel. He found a sheet in a massage hut by the pool; it was cool out. Some Haitians crept back inside the hotel to find bottles of water. Though there was hunger, there was a little food. “People were sharing chocolate bars and bits and pieces to sustain an empty stomach,” he recalls.
With the continual aftershocks, no one slept. Each time it happened, screams echoed in the distance.
Turgeon can’t help but mourn the earthquake as a setback for Haiti, a country he observed improving over the past few years after decades of political strife, desperate poverty and chaos born of natural disaster.
Turgeon’s business was picking up so much he was set to open a new, full-time office there.
He can only hope that when the reconstruction gets underway, one of the first priorities will be to make it an attractive place for business, with proper infrastructure and security. “Instead of Asia, businesses could go to Haiti,” he says.
He hopes that then, for others with the capacity to improve Haiti, the trip there will become routine.
Sadly his friend and coworker, Alexandre Bitton did not survive.
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