New York cops and firefighters pulled off a miracle tonight – rescuing two kids buried for seven days in the rubble of a Haitian supermarket.
The team, which had been doing a “quadrant search,” found the 10-year-old girl and 8-year old boy “two stories down” in the sub-basement of the flattened building on Martin Luther King Avenue in the Port-au-Price suburb of Delmas, Commissioner Ray Kelly said.
Their conditions were not available last night.
The two were the fifth and sixth victims found alive by the NYPD-FDNY team.
Earlier yesterday, military helicopters carrying combat-gear-clad US troops landed on the lawn of Haiti’s damaged presidential palace in a stunning display that officials hope will help jumpstart the slow-moving global effort to bring aid to the crippled country.
Thousand of survivors cheered “Great!” and “Here they come!” as the first troops hit the ground from five choppers.
By late yesterday 800 of 2,200 Marines from Camp Lejeune, NC, had established a beachhead outside decimated Port-au-Prince.
The base, which will have the capacity to produce 40,000 gallons of drinkable water a day, will serve as a much-needed aid distribution point beyond the city’s overburdened airport.
In all, US troop strength is expected to grow to 11,000 both onshore and aboard ships in the Caribbean Sea.
Around 2,000 Canadian soldiers were also being deployed to a town southwest of the capital and ships from Italy, Spain and Venezuela are en route.
The dramatic landing came as the UN Security Council approved adding 2,000 troops to the 7,000 peacekeepers already there, as well 1,500 more cops.
Desperate survivors were hopeful that the troops would help raise the level of security in the increasingly lawless country and enable aid workers to better distribute the food, water and medicine piled up at the airport.
“We are happy that they are coming, because we have so many problems,” said hairdresser Fede Felissaint, who watched the GI’s arrive from behind a fence at the palace.
The US military will also be expanding its operations to two other airports – one in Haiti and one in the Dominican Republic – to alleviate the supply logjam.
The massive, 7.0 magnitude earthquake sent the already weak Haitian government into disarray and left Port-au-Prince at the mercy of looters who have made relief workers fearful of entering certain parts of the capital.
Police Chief Mario Andersol said he was able to muster only 2,000 officers in Port-au-Prince, a city of 2 million, out of the 4,500-person force from before the quake that flattened the city and left an estimated 200,000 dead.
In one slum, Haitian police urged residents to take justice into their own hands as criminals from the city’s jail, which collapsed in the quake, have taken control.
“If you don’t kill the criminals, they will all come back,” a police officer said over a loudspeaker.
Haiti’s army was disbanded in 1995, after a US-led intervention, and much of the country’s security has been provided by UN troops. But many of those soldiers were killed and their equipment destroyed when the UN headquarters collapsed.
Among the UN peacekeepers killed was Andrew Grene, 44, of Hicksville, LI, who was found dead in the rubble.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Post Wire Services