Silver Spring man working in Haiti survives earthquake

A Silver Spring man returned home Saturday after being trapped for 50 hours without food or water in the wreckage of a hotel in the earthquake-ravaged capital of Haiti.

Rick Santos, 47, who heads the international aid group IMA World Health, said in an interview that he was pulled by French firefighters from the rubble of the Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince, where he and several others had been confined to a space of about eight feet by five feet by three feet. He said a first responder from Fairfax County helped check him out.

The days and nights inside the tiny chamber were a time of hope and despair, he said, a period he described as having "a lot of highs and lows."

He said that on Wednesday, a day after the quake, rescuers responded to their screams and banging on the surrounding rubble.

But, he said, the rescuers departed. "We waited and we waited and we waited," Santos said. "And they never came back" that day.

At least two members of the group were pinned by rubble and unable to move.

Conditions in the small space prohibited sleep, Santos said. And the wreckage around them was shifting, causing the already tiny space to shrink.

Then, being able to check wristwatches, the group knew it was Thursday. Santos said he and the others thought someone would come to their rescue. The group waited all day, Santos said. Their only sustenance, according to a statement from IMA, was some chewing gum and a single Tootsie pop.

What happened next, he said, was made possible by the tenacity and resourcefulness of Sarla Chand, a 65-year-old New Jersey woman who was trapped near the others but in a separate pocket.

She was "amazing," Santos said. "All in the dark," he said, she moved about on hands and knees, poked with a stick, explored narrow tunnels within the rubble and finally got a glimpse of the outside world.

At about 7 p.m., Santos said, she got word to the others: "I hear voices. . . . I see lights."

Everybody "started screaming, 'Help, help!' " Santos said. And the French firefighters heard them. Questions and answers were sent back and forth, and soon, Santos said, "they started cutting away concrete."

For the trapped group, weariness and despair were replaced with elation. "We knew we were going to be rescued," Santos said.

Everyone was freed by about 3 a.m. Friday, he said. Then, he and two colleagues went to the U.S. Embassy, were flown to Florida, bused to the Miami airport, and reached Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport shortly after midnight Saturday.

Santos and his colleagues had arrived in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 10. They had held a daylong meeting Tuesday at the hotel on neglected tropical diseases. It had barely ended, he said, when the quake brought the building down around them.

He said he wanted to thank all of the people who, unbeknownst to him, had been checking on his welfare and doing what they could to find and rescue him.

The rebuilding in Haiti will take years, he said. And "I'm committed," he said. "I'm going back to Haiti."