5 yo Girl Rescued After Four Days
Published: October 12, 2005
For nearly 100 hours, 5-year-old Zarabe Shah lay trapped under the stairwell in the rubble of her quake-hit home. On Wednesday, Russian rescuers pulled the dazed, dust-covered girl from the debris, a boost for the relief effort as hopes faded of finding other survivors.
“I want to drink,” the gaunt girl whispered. She wanted a glass of water, but said she wasn’t hungry.
her mother had given Zarabe up for dead and had left for the city of Abbotabad, a town north of Islamabad that suffered far less damage than Muzaffarabad and other parts of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Zarabe was taken to a squalid camp where other survivors of the massive earthquake on Saturday are staying with little shelter or food, though aid is now arriving in bulk in the region.
Zarabe’s cropped hair was caked in dust and her uncle, Akmal Shah, held her tight as she described in a soft voice how she fell from the stairs when the quake struck. The stairwell shielded her from the debris above, and she survived without serious injury.
At the camp, an old man with a plastic bottle gave her tiny sips of water out of its blue cap, but she wasn’t satisfied and wanted more. She said she was unable to sleep in the dark depths of the rubble, but that she didn’t remember much.
The girl was rescued by a Russian team that used sniffer dogs, powerful listening devices and a machine that detects carbon dioxide, a sign of breathing. Like other rescues in devastated areas, the team alternated between digging and removing heavy slabs of concrete, and requesting complete silence from bystanders so they could get a better fix on the girl’s location.
On Tuesday night, a 55-year-old woman and her 75-year-old mother were rescued from the debris of an upscale apartment building in Islamabad that collapsed in the quake.
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