A decade after devastating Haiti earthquake, rescuers reflect on moment captured in iconic photo

No one would recognize Chesapeake firefighter Timothy Rogers in that photo — a photo that flashed around the world 10 years ago today, becoming the iconic image of hope after one of the worst natural disasters in recorded human history.

The camera captured the moment when a boy named Kiki, entombed in rubble for a week after a massive earthquake in Haiti, was freed by rescuers. The 7-year-old, big brown eyes in a sunken face, emerged with a huge smile and outstretched arms — an improbable survivor in the midst of more than 200,000 dead.

In the photo, Rogers is standing to the left, covered in helmet, dust mask and gritty uniform — arms lifted in joy, just like Kiki’s.

“I don’t know why I put my hands up, too,” Rogers said. “I guess it was just instinctively. I guarantee you there wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd.”

Rogers was — still is — a member of Virginia Task Force 2, a disaster response team that’s part of the National Urban Search and Rescue System. Most of the task force’s 80-plus members — firefighters, rescue specialists, K-9 handlers, medics, engineers, hazmat experts — come from across Hampton Roads.

They’re used to harrowing work. Accustomed to devastation and grisly scenes. But Haiti stands out, even for them.

“I can’t believe it’s been 10 years,” said Edward “Woody” Landgrover, a task force member and captain with the Virginia Beach Fire Department.

The sheer scope of the catastrophe has been unforgettable. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere when the earthquake struck on Jan. 12, 2010. Relatively shallow — just 6.2 miles below the surface — the 7.0 quake collapsed at least a third of the buildings in the teeming capital of Port-au-Prince and nearby towns.

Virginia’s task force became part of an international humanitarian rush to the crippled country. Getting there wasn’t easy — mobilizing members, gathering equipment, supplies and trucks, arranging a ride from the Air Force. They landed around midnight, spread a plastic sheet next to the runway and slept on the ground, unaware the dirt was pocked with holes — the burrows of fist-sized tarantulas.

At dawn, they set up their tents, reported to a command post and split into squads, picking their way through devastated neighborhoods, searching for trapped survivors even as bodies were stacked on curbs and aftershocks rolled through.

Radios and cellphones were mostly useless.

“We didn’t even have a real map,” Virginia Beach District Chief Dennis Keane said. “All we had was one of those maps like you get from a hotel, you know, the kind they give out to show tourists where to go.”

Intel came by word of mouth — police, soldiers, aid workers who steered them toward likely spots, or locals who begged them to search this mountain of debris or that jumble of concrete slabs. Those were apartments. That was a school. We heard someone yelling under there. Someone crying under here. Please help us.

Seven days after the quake, they’d only made one “live find,” a United Nations worker who’d managed to survive three days under his desk, buried under 25 feet of caved-in building. All other leads — checked with remote cameras, listening devices or simple muscle and sweat — had only turned up fatalities.

Specially trained dogs sometimes provided the tell. Some are schooled to sniff for life, others for death.

By Jan. 19, the stench of decaying bodies permeated the tropical city. Rescuers were exhausted. Surely the clock had run out for anyone not yet found. On the heels of yet another disappointing day, Keane’s squad prepared to head back to camp when they were flagged down by some men in a truck with another lead.

“We’d had so many that didn’t pan out,” Keane said. “What if we hadn’t listened to this one?”

They were led to a decimated village and pointed down some narrow steps to the ruins of an apartment building.

“It was so large, and it had just pancaked down,” said Mike Hopkins, a Beach battalion chief. “The chances of anyone being alive were very slim, especially after all this time.”

When they detected a muffled noise under the pile, excitement pulsed through the band of rescuers.

As chief, Keane concentrated on “how to harness that energy, keep it going in the right direction. It was clear this one could take a long time.”

Extrications such as this resemble a giant, dangerous game of Jenga. Move the wrong piece and it could all come tumbling down, including damaged buildings nearby.

Carefully, they started taking apart the pile from two angles, unsure exactly where they should tunnel. Debris was passed down the lines, hand to hand. Word got out and more rescuers showed up. Dusk fell and work lights appeared. Soon, a huge crowd had gathered — locals, Haitian authorities, reporters and news photographers from around the globe.

The rescuers hardly noticed.

“In a situation like that, your world gets very small,” Hopkins said. “Your only focus is what’s happening in the hole."

Landgrover recalls little things, “how the dust seemed to hang in the lights. And the photographers — they were up on one of the buildings — they reminded me of birds on a wire.”

They labored in rotation, each man spending five or six minutes in the hole, then tapping out to gulp down water before heading back in, spurred on by what they’d seen on the monitor of a remote camera: the face of a child, down there in the darkness.

“You forget everything else,” Keane said. “You don’t get hungry. You don’t even have to go to the bathroom. You just keep working.”

They reached Kiki’s sister first, 11-year-old Sabrina. She was lifted from the wreckage, limp but conscious. Kiki was pulled out next, blinking at all the lights and commotion. When he beamed that toothy grin and shot his hands skyward, hearts melted and spirits soared. The crowd went wild.

Rogers, who’d been part of the rotation, treasures the memory.

Not because of the photo — he’s quick to point out that he just happened to be standing in the frame when the shutter clicked on that now-famous image.

For him, it’s about “being a member of a rescue team that was able to use all that training we’d been through to actually save lives. And to be there in that moment when that little boy popped out and his arms opened up — wow. That was quite an amazing moment in my life. It really was.”

Three of Kiki’s siblings didn’t make it. Initial reports said his mother had been killed in the collapse, but later stories said she’d escaped and had assumed all her children were dead. Kiki said during his week-long nightmare, he lay next to the body of one of his brothers, praying, crying, licking water from a tiny puddle beneath him.

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Throughout Haiti, only about 120 people were plucked from the rubble alive. Officials say the quake killed at least 230,000 people, wounded 300,000 and displaced 1.5 million.

“Even today, I wonder how Kiki is,” Keane said. “Is he still in Haiti? Has he prospered? I wonder what his thoughts would be about that day.”

In 2015, on the fifth anniversary of the earthquake, British newspaper The Sun dispatched journalists to locate Kiki. They found him in Haiti, a 12-year-old too poor to attend school, yet grateful he didn’t die like so many others.

On this 10th anniversary, no reports have surfaced on Kiki.

Once known across the globe as the “miracle boy of Haiti," he’s vanished into a landscape still overflowing with despair.

Kiki has not faded for his rescuers.

Joanne Kimberlin, 757-446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com