Woman Rescued After Eight Days in Haiti

“After 12 hours of work we have success in saving a young lady 25 years-old and it was nervous. Because one life doesn’t have price.” - Bruno Besson, Search and Rescue Team Leader, Sauveteurs Sans Frontieres, France

Rescue of 25-year old woman named Natalie in a Port-au-Prince grocery store. Photo/video: UN/OCHA

(PORT-AU-PRINCE.SALEM) - Search and rescue workers continued to work through the early hours of Wednesday (20 Jan) to rescue a 25-year-old woman from the ruins of a collapsed market in Port au Prince.

Bruno Besson is Search and Rescue Team Leader with Sauveteurs Sans Frontieres in France: “We are here in Haiti, in a supermarket. We are trying to pickup a lady who is alive after seven days underground. We arrive about 12 o’clock and there were already people on the site. And we asked if they would like to have some help.”

Besson was working at the site from midnight the night before, said that all SAR teams are like a big family coming together to help people after a catastrophe.

“So we decided to work together in order to bring out the people who is inside there,” Besson said.

Four Urban Search and Rescue teams from France, Turkey, Haiti and the United States worked together to save Natalie who was rescued Wednesday morning, almost eight days after the 7.3 maginitude earthquake hit Haiti.

“Here we are working with the Turkish team, with Haitian team and also American teams. We are (inaudible)… with a very big family which is here to help people after a big catastrophe.”

The crowd gathered at the market site was jubilant when Natalie was pulled out of the rubble and transported to a hospital. Luic from the French SAR team added that “after working all day, to find someone alive is the best present one can receive and we are doing all that we can.”

Bruno Besson says he thinks of his family, when trying to save the lives of others.

“I think about my girls, I am a dad and for me its very important to make the maximum to pick up out of the ground this girl and to give a little part of life.”

On the same day, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that international search and rescue teams rescued four more lives including 22-day old baby and a 3-year old child. As of 20 January, over 121 people have been rescued.

Bruno Besson says his work is rewarding. “After 12 hours of work we have success in saving a young lady 25 years-old and it was nervous. Because one life doesn’t have price.”

The rescue efforts in affected areas in Haiti are coordinated by the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG), which is a global network of more than 80 countries and disaster response organizations under the United Nations.

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Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com