A survivor of the Haiti earthquake returned home to Colorado on Tuesday night and was met by a cheering crowd at Denver International Airport.
Dan Woolley had been recovering at a Miami hospital after his rescue. The Colorado Springs man had been trapped beneath the rubble of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince for more than 60 hours.
He arrived at DIA about 9 p.m. and said he’s doing great.
“I’m healing well, I spent a couple of days with my wife, and I’m alive and I’m going home to see my boys,” Woolley said.
He has a head injury and a broken foot. While trapped in the wreckage of an elevator shaft, he wrote notes to his sons, thinking he would never see them again.
“I begged God. You know, ‘God, please bring me back to my wife and my boys,’ and I felt like God wasn’t done with what he’d given me yet,” he said. “I had a journal with me, and I wrote goodbye notes. I was under there for a couple of days, and so I didn’t want to not — you know, there were some things that were unsaid that needed to be said.”
Woolley and his colleague, David Hames, also of Colorado Springs, were working on a documentary in Haiti for Compassion International.
“One moment we were walking up to our hotel room,” Woolley said, “and the next moment, just everything exploded, and it felt like the ground was exploding around us, and the walls started falling, and he (Hames) yelled, ‘It’s an earthquake,’ and I looked for someplace safe to go, but there was no place safe, and so we just each lunged in a direction, and then, all of a sudden, just darkness.”
Hames is still missing.
His wife, speaking to the media earlier Tuesday, said the past few days have involved a lot of ups and downs.
She says the hardest part for her is thinking about the possibility of having to move forward without knowing her husband’s fate, but she is trying to remain optimistic.
“We just still hold out hope,” Woolley said. “We hear that there are still signs of life in the Hotel Montana, that the rescuers are still working hard. I don’t know why it’s working out the way it is right now, but we still just hope and pray that a miracle will happen and believe in that.”
See a video interview with Wooley at .
