Clinton Rabb was dropped off at the Hotel Montana shortly before 5pm on Tuesday for a meeting with his fellow Methodist missionaries. Moments later, the ground began to shake and the building collapsed.
Mr Rabb’s driver was one of the lucky ones: he had got away and was able to confirm the 60-year-old missionary’s movements to his friends at the United Methodist Relief Committee (Umcor).
But that was the last anyone heard, until a team of French firefighters systematically picking through the rubble of the four-star hotel found Mr Rabb and another Umcor executive, Sam Dixon, trapped in a three-foot high cavity last night.
It was not to be a simple rescue. Some 200 people had been trapped or buried in the rubble of the hotel, which is on a ridge overlooking the devastated city.
The French firefighters used metal cutters to clear the way but Mr Rabb’s right leg had been crushed by a large concrete slab, which had also trapped Mr Dixon’s feet. The rescue workers set up IV drips to rehydrate the two missionaries and control their pain.
Advertisement
“When I get pain I ask for help and they give it to me,” he said. “I have fantasies of ice-cold water, but I know I’m in good hands.”
As their colleagues had made clear when it emerged that the two men were missing, both are experienced and resourceful travellers. If anyone could pull through, it would be them.
But back home in Westchester County, New York, Mr Rabb’s wife Suzanne, a Methodist minister, had already admitted to her local newspaper just how frightened she was. “There’s almost a part of me that’s afraid to know,” she said.
She explained that her husband had just come back from a mission to Cuba and had been suffering from a cold. She had asked him to delay his trip but he left anyway and arrived in Haiti on Tuesday morning.
In Port-au-Prince, as the French firefighters struggled to cut him free despite the ever-present risks of after-shocks, Mr Rabb asked a Times reporter to pass on a message. “Tell my wife I deeply love her and we’re going to survive this,” he said. “And I’m praying for all those who did not survive.”
Advertisement
The message was duly delivered over a crackling phone line from Haiti although it was only afterwards that Mrs Rabb found out that her husband and his colleague had been freed after 55 hours under the rubble
“Miracles happen,” she told The Journal News which serves the Lower Hudson Valley.” “We couldn’t believe it. Thank God.”
Alongside the Frenchmen an American search-and-rescue team from Fairfax County, Virginia, was working alongside to free two others trapped in a toppled lift shaft.
One of them, a hotel worker, Luckson Mondesir, had survived since Tuesday’s quake on one bottle of water.
“I slept a little and thought about my family,” he said. “I never thought I’d die. I had no idea that thousands of people have died.”