Rescuers pull man from rubble 11 days after quake

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — An international team of rescuers unearthed a 23-year-old man in good condition from deep beneath the concrete and wooden wreckage of a hotel grocery store Saturday, 11 days after an earthquake crumbled Haiti’s capital.

Dozens of onlookers wearing masks against the stench of the city’s decaying bodies cheered when Rismond Exantus, clad in a black T-shirt and black pants, was carried from a narrow tunnel on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance. He braced one arm with the other.

“I was hungry,” Exantus told The Associated Press from his hospital bed soon after the rescue. “But every night I thought about the revelation that I would survive.”

He said he survived initially by diving under a desk when the rubble started to fall around him. Trapped in such a small space, he had to lie on his back the entire time and survived by drinking cola, beer and cookies.

“I would eat anything I found,” he said. “After the quake, I didn’t know when it was day and when it was night.”

From his hospital bed Saturday, Exantus turned to his family and said, “When you are in a hole, I will try to reach out to you, too.”

Earlier Saturday, the United Nations announced the Haitian government had declared an end to rescue operations. Still, dozens of international teams continued to pick through rubble of the Jan. 12 quake.

“Life doesn’t stop when a government says stop,” said Lt. Col. Christophe Renou, a French Civil Protection official who is part of a team working at the site. “There is still some hope, but it is going to take some luck and God’s help because there are so many destroyed buildings.”

All told, some 132 people have been pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search-and-rescue teams, she said.

Experts say the chance of saving trapped people begins diminishing after 72 hours.

Meanwhile, hundreds gathered for the funeral of the archbishop of Haiti’s stricken capital Saturday, a rare formal ceremony that captured the collective mourning of a shattered nation where mass graves hold many of the dead.

Only a small number of funerals have taken place since the 7.0-magnitude quake struck, with most people buried anonymously and without ceremony in mass graves on the outskirts of the city. An estimated 200,000 people died, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. The United Nations said Saturday the government had preliminarily confirmed 111,481 bodies, but that figure does not account for corpses buried by relatives.

While the two-hour ceremony was held for Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot and vicar Charles Benoit, who also perished in the Jan. 12 earthquake, people in the crowd of about 2,000 wept for deeply personal losses.

As many as 200,000 people have fled the city of 2 million, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. About 609,000 people are homeless in the capital’s metropolitan area, and the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million could leave Haiti’s destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.