Survivors found in Haiti supermarket rubble

Port-au-PRINCE/WASHINGTON - A Haitian who was rescued after being buried for five days in a crushed supermarket Sunday gave a triumphal thumbs-up as Turkish and US rescuers helped him out, CNN reported.

He told rescuers he had eaten a lot of peanut butter and jelly while he was trapped.

He was among the last of five people pulled out of the three-storey Caribbean Supermarket in devastated Port-au-Prince to safety by a team of US and Turkish rescue workers.

CNN reported that the Turkish rescue workers had paid their own way to Haiti to join in the work in the quake-ravaged city.

The five people were trapped in Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake that heaved fierce destruction across the Haitian capital.

More than 20 rescue teams who rushed to Haiti have pulled 62 people from the wreckage, US Agency for International Development officials said, but as each day wears on, the likelihood of rescue fades dramatically.

Haitians have also rescued an untold number of family, friends and strangers, using bare hands and shovels to dig into crushed homes and toppled buildings in the ruined city of 1.9 million people that was at the epicentre of the earthquake.

“It was on the level of miraculous,” Joseph Fernandez, a leader of the rescue task force from Florida told CNN. The victims were “literally surrounded and trapped by food”.

He described to CNN’s Larry King how the victims were able to sustain themselves on what they found in the aisles of the supermarket.

When a seven-year-old girl came out through the narrow passage cleared by the team, the “first thing that came out was fruit roll-ups and cookies”, Fernandez said.

The teams had to step away at one point when the building shifted, and install jacks to shore up the wreckage. They were able to hand water to at least one of the victims who remained buried the longest.

Ireneusz “Eric” Fajkis, another member of the Florida team, described how he had to push debris behind him to be removed by a colleague “so the victim could be pulled out through the tunnel that was created”.

“I had to be really careful about debris coming down. I was wearing a helmet, while the victim was not,” he said.

Mark Grossman, an emergency physician on the team, noted that Saturday, he had to amputate a person’s limb in order to clear him from the wreckage, a harrowing experience that went beyond what he imagined the earthquake mission would be.

“I honestly feel like I’ve landed on another planet,” he said, describing the rubble-covered streets and difficulty of driving through the wreckage.

One of the rescued victims was the mother of a man who lives in Pembroke Pines, Florida, from where some of the rescue team came. It was possible it was her text messages from her living tomb that alerted officials that she was still alive and led rescuers to the site.