Bahamas: Evacuated Bahamians tell of Haiti's horror

By KRYSTEL ROLLE ~ Guardian Staff Reporter ~ krystel@nasguard.com:



Amid the death and despair that clouds Haiti, comes a miraculous story of survival.

Two Bahamians narrowly escaped death on Tuesday after a powerful earthquake ripped off the walls of the hotel they were staying in and flattened buildings all around them.

As the death toll rose as more bodies were dug out of concrete graves, Civil Aviation Director Captain Patrick Rolle and Flight Inspector Hubert Adderley said they are lucky to be alive.

The raw anguish permeating throughout the impoverished nation is something they said they could not have concocted in their worst nightmares.

The men, who were evacuated from Haiti on Wednesday and taken to Jamaica before arriving in New Providence on a Sky Bahamas flight yesterday, told of horrific scenes they said would not be forgotten anytime soon.

Both Rolle and Adderley said they were just getting settled in their rooms in Hotel Carib in Port-au-Prince when the earth shook.

The two were in Haiti attending an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Safety and Security Conference.

"I was just checked in, got into the room and was sending an e-mail to my wife letting her know that I had arrived safe. When I got up from the chair to go over to the bed to make a note of something, the room started vibrating," Rolle recalled.

He said the wall in his room then collapsed around him, part of which hit him in his head.

"The room itself basically caved in," he added.

Rolle said he tried to get out of the main door but could not as the door frame was warped.

As a result, Rolle said he left through a sliding door and jumped a wall onto the roof of a restaurant.

"I did it. It sounds simple, but I don't know how I did it," Rolle added.

Adderley said he made a similar escape.

"My first instinct was to get out of this place quick," he said.

And, according to Adderley, that's exactly what he did.

"The sliding door was open. So I just got out, jumped over the railing, fell on the ground and continued moving to an open area," he said.

"I've never been in an earthquake before. My immediate thought was my family at home. I didn't come over here to not go back."

Rolle and Adderley said as they were riding away from the collapsed hotel, they saw a frightening sight — dead bodies all around them.

The harrowing images that are shown of the ravaged Port-au-Prince only reveal the beginning of the total devastation and despair that the powerful earthquake wrought on the nation, the Bahamian survivors said.

"What they're showing you [on the international news] is the main street," Rolle said. "What they're not showing you are the side streets where everyone lived — where nobody lives now. All the residents moved and now sleep in the middle of the street. Everyone is literally living in the streets."

He said the residents used stones to block the road so they could make their beds in the streets on the side of their dead loved ones.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the coast of Haiti at approximately 4:43 p.m. Tuesday.

Rolle, who had a gash on his head, said thousands of people were injured during the quake but are unable to get medical help.

"So they're there and there is no medical aid; the hospital has collapsed," he said.

"The UN medical clinic is overwhelmed. Another hospital was declared unfit. So everyone who was in ICU had to be taken out. There were literally hundreds of persons there, arms missing, foot off, bones exposed," he said.

"The media [are] saving the public from some of the things that [are] actually happening. The worst part is seeing persons sitting near their dead relatives. There's no one collecting the dead bodies."

The American Red Cross estimates that the earthquake may have affected about three million people in and near Port-au-Prince.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti are feared dead.

Bodies are piled along the devastated streets of Port-au-Prince. However, no official count has been made as thousands of people are thought to be trapped beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings.

"It's something that I would not like to experience again, seeing the amount of dead persons," Rolle said.

He added that he's still not sure what he feels.

"I can tell you that things that I thought were important in life are no longer important. When you see people lose everything they've got you realize that there is nothing else there. The only thing you have, I guess for myself as a Christian, is a relationship that cannot be broken by disaster," he said.

"And you have a hope that you can't lose but when you see all of the people walking around with no hope and not knowing where they're going to get water or food, with no homes to go to, we realize that as a human the only thing you have are relationships."

Adderley said the images that he saw will stay with him for a long time.

"What was gut wrenching about all this, in the back of the hotel there's a hill and on the side of the hill are all these homes and when you look over in that area all you saw was a white cloud of dust and all you heard were moans and the cries of people and it was just gut wrenching," he said.

"It's something that I would never want to experience again. It's going to take a couple days to process out of this. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone because there are persons we saw an hour or two before who we haven't seen since. It's a really, really horrific situation in Haiti right now."

January 15, 2010


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