New York Rescue Team Saves 4 in Haiti

Members of a New York search-and-rescue team have rescued four people from the quake ravaged Haiti.

The joint NYPD-FDNY team Sunday afternoon rescued a 35-year-old man trapped since Tuesday in the rubble of a four-story building on Rue Belencourt in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

They used a rescue camera to locate him, and then NYPD paramedic, Det. Randin Miller, climbed into a narrow space with the trapped man to start an intravenous fluid line to combat the victim's dehydration.

Earlier today, the rescue team pulled two adult males and a teenage girl alive from the rubble of a grocery store housed in a three-story building that collapsed in Tuesday's earthquake in Port-au-Prince.

Those three victims were removed to a United Nations hospital established at Haiti's airport about five miles away, where the girl, about 13, was treated for leg injuries and the two men for undetermined injuries.

Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne says the victims told rescuers that they have survived on food and water from the store. A total of 26 New York City police and fire rescuers worked through the night to try to extricate the victims by painstakingly cutting through concrete debris and shoring up space to safely reach them, using timber cribbing they brought with them from an OEM warehouse in Brooklyn last week.

Sunday morning, freshly rested members of the 80-strong NYPD/FDNY team replaced those who worked through the night on the rescue. They were joined by members of a Florida rescue team.

Members of the search-and-rescue team have also assisted at ground zero and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Gustav.

Meanwhile, rescue officials are working feverishly to find survivors among the ruins as officials strain to distribute aid despite the chaos.

Four days after a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake decimated Haiti, hospitals are overflowing with people in need of immediate medical attention and help just can't come fast enough.

For many, surviving the earthquake was only half the misery. Haiti's most wounded are being transfered to the Jimani Hospital of the Dominican Republic. The tiny hospital is trying to save as many people as they can -- children with skull fractures, mothers missing toes -- but there aren't enough doctors or medical supplies.

"We have a lot of amputations, guys that have gangrene, open fractures" one medic told NBC New York. "We need more space and more personnel to perform the amputations." 

The courageous workers on the border of the Dominican Republic haven't stopped working since the quake demolished the impoverished country. But relief efforts are slowly beginning to make their way into the catastrophe-ridden region.

Even as money flows toward Haitian earthquake relief efforts, a team of ten doctors, mostly internists, were leaving New Jersey Sunday on a mission of mercy to the land where they were born.

"We're gonna be armed to face ... what a doctor would do in a combat situation," said Dr. Bernier Lauredan of Irvington, New Jersey.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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