A second night fell. Their thirst was acute—relieved only slightly by drinking their own urine. Dixon and Rabb were speaking less and becoming incoherent, which suggested that infection was setting in.
“I went through all the stages of grief— anger, bargaining,” Santos says. “I wondered whether God was telling me that I shouldn’t have been gone from home so much. The hardest moments were thinking that my sons were going to grow up without me.”
Day broke, and they heard more noise from outside, and more helicopters. Nothing sounded close, however. Chand decided to try digging an opening in the looser rubble on the other side of her space. Hours later, she had wriggled into an area in which it was possible to stand, but from there, there was no way out.
Night was coming on again, and Santos feared that Dixon and Rabb would not live until morning. The idea of witnessing their deaths and being unable to help was horrifying—as was the notion of the four less injured slowly following, through dehydration and kidney failure.
“I decided to wait one more day and then write a note on a piece of paper and put it with my passport in my breast pocket, so that whoever found my body would know who I was,” Santos says. “We were approaching the 50-hour mark, and bracing for the absolute worst, when, about 7 p.m., we heard drilling and voices. We started banging on the ceiling, and then we heard a voice calling to us in French: ‘We’re here. We’re here to rescue you.’ They were firemen from Paris.”
Everyone began to sing the doxology: “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow…”
It took five hours for the firemen to reach them, but now the time was flying. The group shouted their names and other information through the widening gap in the concrete. The firemen reached Santos first, dragging him out by his ankle until they reached a level area and could put him on a stretcher. “They carried me out over what seemed like tons of rubble,” he says. “Then I could see stars and the open sky, and they gave me some water, and they handed me a satellite phone.” He called his wife to tell her that he was safe. “Yes, I know!” she told him. “It’s on TV!”
Luciani had turned on the news for the first time minutes earlier, after receiving a call from an ABC News correspondent who said that images of Rick being pulled from the rubble would be on the 11:30 broadcast. “I cried then,” she says. “I never imagined that he was trapped.”
The firemen worked another hour to dig out Varghese, followed by Chand and Gulley, who was able to get water to Dixon and Rabb, both still pinned fast. But by the time the hole was big enough for one of the firemen to jump down and begin administering first aid, it was too late. Dixon died before he could be freed. Both of Rabb’s legs had to be amputated in order to remove him. He was airlifted to a Florida hospital, where he later died of his injuries.
None of the other four learned of this until later. After being checked out by a team of paramedics from Fairfax, Va., Santos, Varghese, Chand and Gulley rode away from the ruins of the hotel in a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) van, still hopeful for their companions. The devastation in the city stunned them.
It was 2 a.m. when the four reached the mostly intact American Embassy. They were examined again, this time by military doctors who pronounced them in good shape despite bruises and severe dehydration. USAID promised them seats on the first transport flight out the next morning, and a mission group staying at the embassy gave them clean clothes from their own suitcases. After an hour of sleep, they were taken to the airport and put on a C-130 transport plane to Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida, and from there, bused to Miami International Airport. After what had felt like a lifetime beneath the rubble, everything seemed to be happening with lightning speed.
The flight Santos took to Baltimore/ Washington International Airport turned out to be the one on which he was originally booked, but his arrival was hardly routine. TV news cameras were there to greet him, as was Luciani, whose embrace he describes as one of the happiest moments of his life. Although Lucas and Alex knew nothing of their father’s ordeal—or so their parents believed—they were excited by their mother’s promise that this particular homecoming would be celebrated with a party. (A few weeks later, as Luciani was preparing to leave on a business trip to Geneva for her work with the Pan American Health Organization, Lucas asked her, “Is there going to be an earthquake where you’re going, too?”)
As soon as they got home, Luciani asked Santos to go to the Facebook page and see if he could provide news about the missing. Unfortunately, he could not. The two men trapped in the elevator shaft—Dan Woolley and Mondesir Luckson—had been rescued after 60 hours, but they were among the last to be pulled out of the Montana alive. Some 200 hotel guests and staff perished, including everyone at the second-floor balcony restaurant.
It took about six weeks for Santos’ bruises to heal, but the emotional recovery has been slower. Attending Dixon’s funeral at the First United Methodist Church in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.—where he met Dixon’s widow and four children—was painful, as was the first IMA board meeting without his friend. Even several months later, Santos finds it difficult to speak about Dixon or Rabb —whom he got to know and admire greatly during their 55 hours together—without breaking down. He says he hasn’t had flashbacks or nightmares, but that travel puts him more on edge than it used to.
“It’s very clear to me that I’ve been given a second chance, that I could have died, and that I’m not going to waste it,” Santos says. What’s also clear is that his—and IMA’s—commitment to Haiti is for the long term. Both he and Chand have noted with amusement that interviewers sometimes appear disappointed to hear that they didn’t emerge from the rubble with some sort of epiphany.
“I guess it would make a better story to say I’ve seen the light and decided to do humanitarian work,” he says, laughing a little. “But…I already was doing humanitarian work. And I still think it’s important.”
What lingers, he says, is an awareness of how fast disaster can strike, how quickly life passes. On a warm Sunday afternoon in late spring, Santos is keenly aware of the fact that his children are clamoring for him to stop talking to a reporter and come play with them in the yard. Tomorrow morning, he’s leaving for the Congo.
Kathleen Wheaton lives in Bethesda and writes frequently for Bethesda Magazine.
