Rescuers, back home from Haiti, used instincts to save victims

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.— South Florida firefighters used a carjack to lift rubble from the leg of a wounded man trapped inside a Port-au-Prince, Haiti, hospital, relying on their instincts and makeshift tools.

“No training could have prepared us for what we were doing there,” said one Delray Beach paramedic, Greg Tabeek, 23. “You just do it.”

The 12-member search-and-rescue group returned Sunday to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport,
where they were greeted by relieved family members holding up “Welcome
Home” signs. The daughter of one firefighter brought along marshmallow
peeps as a special treat.

“It was scary at first, but knowing that they had security with them eased my mind,” said Danielle Beardsley, whose husband, Ed Beardsley, 28, of Delray Beach, was on the trip.

The team, including four firefighters from Delray Beach and two from other South Florida stations, removed four survivors from the wreckage of the devastating earthquake.

“The work there is not done, but we are so proud of them,” said Fire Chief David James of the Delray Beach department. “These were volunteers who stepped forward and they had the skills they needed.”

The firefighters were part of a team from the Caring House Project Foundation, a Delray Beach-based charity founded by real estate developer Frank McKinney. The foundation has worked to build villages and schools on the island since the late 1990s.

“I go there at least twice a year and each time you
see the country slowly progressing,” said McKinney, who also went on
the rescue mission. Now, “an eraser just goes through and takes it all
away.”

His charity organized the trip, also bringing in medics from Colorado.
The group set up tents and slept at the city’s airport. They took
search assignments from U.N. officials and teamed with a Nicaraguan and
Peruvian rescue group.

“You have to be methodical at what you are doing so that you don’t get crushed and so that you don’t crush the victim,” said Ed Crelin, 48, of Delray Beach.

The team’s most memorable rescue was a patient in
his 20s who had been trapped in a four-story Doctors Without Borders
hospital that toppled into a two-story ruin. The man was struck by a
bed frame, and had a chest tube still attached to his body when the
firefighters reached him in a 2-foot-square crevice.

The team borrowed a carjack from a Jordanian rescue
group so that they could move the rubble away and get to him, said
firefighter Steve Moews, 37, of Delray Beach.

“This guy’s will to live was incredible,” Tabeek
said. “As I was using the carjack to move the bed, he took a hammer and
was helping me hit the metal.”

When the man was freed, he shook hands with each team member and thanked them.

As the group passed through the streets, victims’ family members called out to them, pleading for help.

“There were so many challenges, from lack of
communication to lack of tools,” Moews said. “But I had the training,
so I said, absolutely, I’m in. It was worth it.”

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