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French rescuers pull girl from quake debris

28 January 2010 01:49 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. French rescuers pulled a teenage girl from the rubble of a home on the campus of the destroyed College St. Gerard on Wednesday, a stunning recovery 15 days after an earthquake devastated the city, APA reports Associated Press.
Darlene Etienne, 17, was covered with a thermal blanket and given oxygen as rescuers rushed her on a stretcher to a French-run field hospital for treatment.
Her family said Etienne had just started studying when the disaster struck, trapping scores of people in the rubble of university buildings, hostels and homes.
"We thought she was dead," her cousin, Jocelyn A. St. Jules, said in a telephone call from Marche Dessalines, a town north of the capital.
The last confirmed rescue of someone trapped by the initial quake occurred Saturday, 11 days later, when a man was extricated from the ruins of a hotel grocery store. A man pulled Tuesday from the rubble of a downtown store later and treated by the U.S. military for severe dehydration and a broken leg said he had been trapped in an aftershock.
More than 100 people have been unearthed since the Jan. 12 quake, but most of those were in the immediate aftermath and authorities say it is unlikely for anyone to survive more than 72 hours without water.