Elite NY team led rescue of 2 children in Haiti

It had been a grim and frustrating day for New York Task Force 1.

Since arriving in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 16, the 80-member search-and-rescue team had saved four lives. But now, scouring crumbled neighborhoods for signs of life seven days after the 7.0-magnitude quake, they found none.

A university, a large apartment building, a school full of children.

"We're sorry," they told survivors who begged them to recover their dead. "We're here to look for the living."

The team, an elite corps of New York police officers and firefighters trained to extract survivors from collapsed buildings, had been unable to save teammates on Sept. 11, 2001. At least this time, they thought, there had been lives left to save.

It was nearing dusk, and some of the New York rescuers, along with a team from Virginia, were heading back to their camp at the Port-au-Prince airport when Haitian police officers flagged them down on Martin Luther King Avenue.

"I know you guys have been working all day," an officer said to a rescuer from Virginia who understood Creole. "If you're tired, could you come back in the morning?"

The Haitian officers had just broken up a disturbance: A distraught father had been arguing with his neighbors, begging them to help dig for his two children. The father insisted they were alive.

The rescuers jumped from their trucks: "We'll go now," someone said.

Their world collapsed

It was nearly dinnertime on Tuesday, Jan. 12, and Kiki and Sabrina Joachin were doing their homework. In a second-floor apartment in the Nazan section of Port-au-Prince, they sat at a table while their mother, Odinel, cooked rice and beans for her six children - all inside the apartment except for 4-year-old David, who was playing outside.

Then their world collapsed.

In less than 60 seconds, the quake flattened - pancaked - the four-story apartment building. Odinel Joachin, 38, pushed pieces of concrete off her body and screamed for her children. She found only David.

The other five, she was convinced, were dead.

But as Joachin, her husband and son got on with the task of surviving in an apocalyptic city, Kiki, 7, and Sabrina, 10, huddled with their 3-year-old brother, Titite, amid a tangle of chairs in a hot, dusty space, less than 2 feet high. A sister lay near them, dead; they could hear no sound from their other sister.

As darkness descended, Kiki and Sabrina sat curled in balls, their heads between their knees. The next day, Titite asked for water. He asked again on Thursday and on Friday, his sister recalled later.

He died on Saturday.

The space filled with the smell of death.

Six nights would pass before someone heard their cries. It was their aunt: Denival Orana, 29, had returned to scavenge for belongings. As she tugged at the rubble, she heard voices below.

"Mama! Help us, Mama! Water!"

She ran to find their father.

Founded 20 years ago

New York Task Force 1 was founded two decades ago by FDNY Deputy Chief Ray Downey, who after the 1989 California earthquake created a team that could perform seemingly impossible rescues, finding and extracting survivors trapped under tons of concrete.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Downey and many members of his task force rushed to the burning Twin Towers. The rest of the team would later search for them, in vain.

Downey's son, FDNY Battalion Chief Joe Downey of West Islip, now leads the task force, which includes some 20 Long Islanders. And as he stepped off a plane at the Port-au-Prince airport on Jan. 16, he knew that his team was designed for this mission: a self-sufficient group with tents, trucks, fuel and food, and the training to pull people from crumbled concrete buildings. His father's vision had come true.

When the police officers hailed them down on Martin Luther King Avenue, seven days - nearly to the minute - had passed since the earthquake.

Rescuers from New York and Virginia dove into a maze of alleys off the avenue, following the Haitian officers to the spot where Ohdi Joachin, 42, alone and with just half a crowbar, was working on a small opening in the side of the rubble. Search specialists extended a tiny camera through the opening and saw Kiki and Sabrina - about 12 feet away - alive.

Working together, the teams approached from above, carving through layers of concrete with jackhammers, saws and rebar cutters.

By nightfall, the rest of the New York team had arrived with additional tools and 150 workers swarmed over the rubble, rigging lights, toting tools, and hauling away tons of debris, one bucket at a time. They taped a water bottle and a glow stick to a pipe and passed it to the children through a side hole. On the camera's screen, they watched as the children swallowed their first gulps of water.

In the deepening hole, rock breakers worked in 5- or 10-minute shifts, two or three at a time.

Michael Iliadis, a police detective from New Hyde Park, stood on the lip of the hole.

'It's a miracle'

"We're close," Iliadis said. "It's a miracle, it really is."

Chris Dunic, 34, a firefighter from Sheepshead Bay, reached Kiki first. The boy looked up with wide, scared eyes.

"Here, OK," Dunic said in stilted French.

But Kiki shrank away, pointing to his sister and the body of their brother. Kiki wasn't leaving without them.

The rescuers needed Kiki to come out, to clear the space so they could reach Sabrina, who was trapped behind a chair. Kiki's aunt descended into the hole the rescuers had carved.

"Kiki! Kiki! Come, Kiki! Come forward! Yes!" she called in Creole.

The little boy clambered out.

Rich Miller, 49, a police detective from White Plains, lifted Kiki over his head.

"Say hello to the world, kid," Miller said, "and let the world say hello to you."

Kiki threw his arms over his head and flashed a brilliant grin. The rescuers roared.

Sabrina was lifted out minutes later, enveloped in dust, her green barrettes still in her black hair. The children were dehydrated, but otherwise appeared unhurt.

As rescuers carried them to a truck that would take them to an Israeli military tent hospital 5 miles away, Ohdi Joachin climbed into the hole and wept.

Three of his children were alive. But three had perished.

Five days later, he gathered up his family and headed to the countryside, leaving the shattered city behind.

With reporting by freelance photojournalist Charles Eckert