A powerful earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12, damaging not only buildings and roads but the foundation of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, ...
Though I am in USA I read all Indian News papers everyday in net. But I couldn't get more about Haiti Earthquake....
But i n USA I regularly get update of whats happening after the earthquake...mostly live videos. Some to share....( watch the video also) As Haitians flee, the dead go uncounted Earthquake robs victims and mourners of even the most basic funeral rites. Along with everything else stolen by last week’s earthquake, Haitians must now add another loss: the ability to identify and bury the dead. Funeral rites are among the most sacred of all ceremonies to Haitians, who have been known to spend more money on their burial crypts than on their own homes. Read a sad story and then watch the Video attached:
"Amputation saves not just one, but two lives."
Posted: MSNBC, Tuesday, January 19, 2010 7:00 AM.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The split-second choices in a disaster of this magnitude can haunt forever.
Dr. Marc Grossman knows he had no choice but to choose life over limb, but of course, would have preferred another option.An emergency room physician at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, Grossman is a member of the South Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force.
The team, tunneling through debris at a collapsed school on Saturday, found a 15-year-old girl still alive. But she was pinned. Her left arm was crushed under concrete. If there were time, the team had the gear that could lift 25,000 pounds of rubble. They might have been able to shift the rubble just enough to get her arm out.
But there was no time.
"She was dying right in front of me," said Grossman.
A father of two, Grossman called a colleague back at Jackson Memorial to talk "amputation." He said he got instructions from his colleague on how to perform an amputation, but the directions were as if he were working in a sterile operating home back home. This, of course was no operating room. And it was far from sterile.
In an opening, less than 12 inches high, the doctor inch-wormed his way to the teenager.
He knocked her out with drugs, and then with a scalpel, tried to cut.
It didn’t work.
In that tiny space, it could not cut thru the bone.
He backed out and then slithered in with a surgical bone saw. That didn’t work either. He had less than an inch of space to draw the blade back and forth.
Grossman backed out again and looked at what else the search team had.
There, in the pile of gear sat a circular saw.
"It’s like a saw found in any Home Depot in America" said Grossman.
The team carries it to cut tree branches and other debris in disasters, but now it would become a surgical instrument.
Grossman worked his way back to the survivor.
With a tourniquet tied around her upper left arm, in one cut, he took off her arm.
He pulled her to freedom.
But there was more.
Just behind the now amputated survivor, there was another girl.
She was also still alive.
Had the first girl’s arm not been amputated, "the other survivor would have surely died, too. There was no way to get to her but through the pinned survivor," said Grossman.
A split-second decision in the darkness of a tunnel through a collapsed building that saved not one, but two lives.
As the people of Haiti grow more desperate, it’s difficult to understand why the outpouring of aid — from individuals, relief agencies, corporations and governments around the world — is apparently working so slowly.
We seem to have supplies, food, water, personnel and such on the ground. So why it is that no one appears to be in charge?
- James H.
Where is the Red Cross? I have heard about all the money that has been contributed by Americans but I have yet to see any Red Cross help from news crews who haven't seemed to have any trouble getting in.
- Mark R.
The death toll can only be guessed. In a country of 9 million, the loss of 100,000 souls in a single disaster is a little more than 1 percent of the Haitian population, or the equivalent of 3.3 million Americans.
Millions of survivors are in need of urgent medical attention; many simply won’t receive it — even if relief efforts proceed flawlessly. Most local hospitals have been destroyed. The ones that remain have no supplies. Doctors have resorted to using hacksaws and vodka in place of surgical instruments and alcohol.Anyone likes to help visit:https://secure2.convio.net/mapi/site/Donation2?df_id=2880&2880.donation=form1&JSe