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After one week since the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, the UN says “hope persists” in finding more people alive in the ruins of buildings. The UN usually decides to call off search and rescue attempts between five and seven days after a disaster, once no-one has been saved for a day or two – but people have been known to survive for much longer, BBC news stated.
In 1995, Park Seung Hyun was pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed supermarket in Seoul, South Korea, 16 days after it collapsed and in January 2004, Shahr-Banu Mazandarani, an Iranian woman in her 90s was rescued after nine days buried in the rubble of her home after the Bam earthquake.
Julie Ryan, a co-ordinator with UK-based group International Rescue Committee (IRC), says that survival largely depends on what happens the moment the quake first hits. “The ideal situation is you have become trapped and entombed but have some sort of oxygen supply from the outside world, are not injured and also have some sort of access to water,” she told the BBC. “You have usually managed to get yourselves into some sort of void where you are enclosed by the building but it doesn’t injure you.”
She said an IRC team rescued three boys who had been buried in the ruins of their school for five days after the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005.
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