Haitian man pulled out alive 11 days after quake

• The rescue operation lasted four hours at a hotel that had been wrecked by temblor

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Sunday

International rescuers yesterday pulled a 24-year-old Haitian man alive from the rubble of a collapsed hotel in the capital Port-au-Prince, 11 days after the earthquake that devastated the city.

He was the latest of more than 130 people who have been pulled out still living from under wrecked buildings by rescue teams from around the world since the January 12 quake.

After a four-hour rescue operation, the Haitian man was carefully extracted from the rubble of the Hotel Napoli Inn in downtown Rue du Centre.

Rescuers said he appeared to be able to move his limbs but was thirsty.

To reach the survivor, two members of French and Greek search-and-rescue teams had crawled into the tangled mass of concrete rubble, wooden beams and corrugated iron that was all that was left of the hotel in downtown Rue du Centre.

They sawed away material to help the trapped man out.

“He was holding the light to help us. He just said ‘Thank You’ when we pulled him out,” Mr Carmen Michalska, a rescuer with the Greek team, told Reuters.

Journalists and onlookers cheered and clapped as the man was carried to an ambulance on a stretcher.

“We have an indication there are more people in there. We are going to go back in,” Mr Michalska said.

French, Greek and US rescuers had earlier located the man, who had been heard tapping and talking under the rubble.

The United Nations said on Saturday the government had declared the post-quake search and rescue phase over, but some operations were still continuing.

Meanwhile, international aid workers looked to speed up relief efforts in Haiti today after criticism that food, water and medicine was not getting to victims 12 days after a devastating earthquake.

Survivors camped out in filthy conditions in about 300 makeshift camps across Haiti’s shattered capital, Port-au-Prince. People complained they were not getting enough aid, despite a huge US-led international relief campaign.

Responding to the criticisms, US Agency for International Development chief Rajiv Shah said his organisation was doing all it could under difficult circumstances.

“The scale of the destruction and the human consequence ... is just unparalleled. ... We’re never going to meet the need as quickly as we’d like,” Mr Shah told Reuters. “We’re going to be here providing the support for a long time.”

The January 12, magnitude-7 quake killed up to 200,000 people, Haitian authorities said, and left up to three million people hurt or homeless and clamoring for medical assistance, food and water in nightmarish conditions in the hemisphere’s poorest country.

At a camp in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, people desperate for food swarmed bags of rice being off-loaded from a dump truck, even with US and UN troops and Haitian police standing guard.

The chaos alarmed aid workers from Plan International, who stopped the food delivery until the crowd could be brought under control with the help of several warning shots from the guards.

Single bags, stamped with the U.S. flag, were handed to every four adults in line to divide among themselves later. The aid group estimated as many as 15,000 people were in line.

The World Food Programme was forced to curtail some distribution activities following attacks on two of its relief convoys on Friday, said Thiry Benoit, the UN agency’s deputy country director for Haiti. (Reuters)