Alone in the darkness beneath layers of rubble, Dan Woolley felt blood streaming from his head and leg.
Then he remembered -- he had an app for that.
Woolley,
an aid worker, husband, and father of two boys, followed instructions
on his cell phone to survive the January 12 earthquake in Haiti.
"I
had an app that had pre-downloaded all this information about treating
wounds. So I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound
fracture," Woolley told CNN.
The application on his iPhone is
filled with information about first aid and CPR from the American Heart
Association. "So I knew I wasn't making mistakes," Woolley said. "That
gave me confidence to treat my wounds properly."
Trapped in the ruins of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince,
he used his shirt to bandage his leg, and tied his belt around the
wound. To stop the bleeding on his head, he firmly pressed a sock to it.
Concerned
he might have been experiencing shock, Woolley used the app to look up
what to do. It warned him not to sleep. So he set his phone alarm to go
off every 20 minutes.
Once the battery got down to less than 20
percent of its power, Woolley turned it off. By then, he says, he had
trained his body not to sleep for long periods, drifting off only to
wake up within minutes.
Woolley's job keeps him tech savvy. He
oversees interactive projects for the Christian child advocacy
organization Compassion International in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
With his injuries tended to, he wrote a
note to his family in his journal: "I was in a big accident, an
earthquake. Don't be upset at God. He always provides for his children
even in hard times. I'm still praying that God will get me out, but he
may not. But even so he will always take care of you."
The journal is stained with his blood.
After more than 60 hours, Woolley was pulled from the rubble.
"Those guys are rescue heroes," he said of the crew that pulled him out.
His
colleague David Hames has not been found. The two had been standing
together when the earthquake struck and the Hotel Montana crumbled.
They were making a film about poverty in Haiti and had just gotten back to the hotel, heading to the elevator in the lobby.
"Then
all of a sudden just all craziness broke loose," Woolley said.
"Convulsions of the ground around us, the walls started rippling and
then falling on us. [Hames] yelled out, 'I think it's an earthquake!' I
looked for someplace safe to jump to and there was no safe place."
When the shaking stopped, Woolley couldn't see. And his friend was not with him.
He
turned on the focus light of a camera he was wearing around his neck,
but he didn't have his glasses. "So I actually took some pictures and
would look at the back of the lens of the camera and saw in one of
those pictures the elevator that I ended up hobbling over to. And that
became my safe place."
Once in the elevator, he used the app --
called "Pocket First Aid & CPR" from Jive Media -- to tend to his
injuries. Woolley said his phone
"was like a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife that enabled me to
treat my own injuries, track time, stay awake and stay alive."
Woolley heard voices of some other people trapped nearby, and they spoke with each other.
"About
a day, maybe day and a half in, we heard rescuers, and they had a list
of our names at that point, because they were able to talk to one of
the people we were talking with. And so then it seemed like, OK, this
is going to happen, we're actually going to get rescued.
"But
then it just took a long time and there were times where I didn't hear
anything or I'd hear drilling in a far part of the building and just
didn't get any reassurance they were still coming for me," Woolley said.
"The
scene outside was a lot more chaotic and less simple than I imagined in
my head. ... But eventually they came for me and did an amazing rescue."
Back
home now in Colorado Springs with his wife Christina and children Josh,
6, and Nathan, 3, Woolley said he's grateful to God for getting him
through the ordeal.
"Happiness is a morning with ... family, filled with Legos, kissing boo-boos and normalcy."