Posted on 01/23/2010 10:59:39 AM PST by topfile
The parents of Britney Gengel, the college student from Rutland still missing after the Jan. 12 eathquake in Haiti, returned home yesterday from a nine-day vigil at her Florida campus after hearing from the US State Department that the mission has shifted from rescue to recovery, leaving slim chances of finding any survivors.
“They will start pulling the building apart layer by layer,’’ Leonard Gengel read from a statement yesterday at Logan International Airport, referring to the hotel where his 20-year-old daughter had been staying when the 7.0 earthquake hit.
His voice breaking, he said, “We are asking our government to guarantee that every American dead or alive [in the hotel rubble] be accounted for and brought home in a dignified way.’’
The State Department did not immediately return a call yesterday.
-snip-
Leonard Gengel made an emotional appeal to President Obama last week, urging him to do more to aid the rescue effort.
Gengel told reporters yesterday that he never imagined he would be begging the federal government to bring his daughter home, dead or alive.
“It’s just unimaginable and unthinkable,’’ he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Making sure he got plenty of that $100 / lb. Kobe beef down in his belly.
air time?
There are three other students and two faculty members from the same University still missing.
My heart grieves with these parents in this tragic situation. I have daughters in this age range. I told my husband that my first desire would be to go and dig with my own bare hands. I can’t imagine the paralysis and helplessness these parents feel.
Sad thing is in many areas they are just scooping up rubble and dumping it in a landfill then covering it...but there are unidentified bodies and/or body parts among the rubble. I don’t really see any other way for them to do this sort of work on such a massive scale.
I imagine the reason they’re going to sort through the rubble of the hotel is that there were foreign nationals who died in the collapse.
One sad story, but just one sad story of more than 100,000 sad stories resulting from the Haiti Quake.
What were a bunch of twentysomething single white females doing in Port-Au-Prince by themselves?
At my company we send people through the Caribbean all the time. Rule No. 1: no one goes through Haiti, specifically Port-Au-Prince. Even the airport is considered unacceptably dangerous for a flight stop, as you can be accosted in the transit hall.
Maybe people weren't expecting an earthquake, but that's just one of many unacceptable hazards in that insane island.
If they haven’t been found so far they will probably end up in a landfill. Earlier thread showed them dumping the debris with a few bodies mixed in. Reports of many many bodies ending up this way.
Ummm.. how about you read the article:
Gengel said the State Department informed him yesterday that 40 American citizens remained trapped in the rubble of Hotel Montana in Port-Au-Prince, where his daughter was staying with 11 classmates and two professors from Lynn University in Florida. They had traveled to Haiti to feed the poor with the program Journey for Hope-Haiti.
Eight of those students have been rescued. Britney Gengel, three classmates, and the two professors are still missing.
Heartbreaking situation for this family, and for all the others similarly affected. Sometimes catastrophic events are on such a scale that the best efforts of all responders simply aren’t enough.
...and their mission is quite a ways from Port au Prince.
‘What were a bunch of twentysomething single white females doing in Port-Au-Prince by themselves?”
They weren’t ‘by themselves’ many of them were there as part of various mission or aid activities.
So the girls were there to learn about voodoo?
Our youth go on mission trips too (if that is what it was)...
..but not to Haiti....
..only our older, mature men go to Haiti.
Why would you say that?
If it were one of my daughters I would have been down there digging myself within 24 hours. My wife would have beat me there by ten minuters.
I wouldn’t say that. I was responding to your post where you mentioned voodoo.
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