NYC Team's Amazing Haiti Rescue

MYFOXNY.COM - Rescuers broke out in applause as an 8-year-old boy named Kiki lifted his arms up to the heavens like a little champion moments after New York City's urban search and rescue team pulled him up to safety.

The specially trained cops and firefighters from the NYPD and FDNY found him and his 10-year-old sister, Sabrina, buried under slabs of concrete, two stories beneath a flattened building on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Port-au-Prince. They survived for a week under the rubble after the massive earthquake in Haiti.

Doctors at a makeshift Israeli-run hospital who treated the children are amazed they survived.

"I cannot explain medically or physiologically how it's happened," a medic said. "Maybe it's a miracle. Someone upstairs loves them very much."

Kiki and his sister were trapped in a void, but not crushed. Once in a while, people gave them a little bit of water through a hole.

But with just a tiny bit of water, the heat, and no food, the children were becoming increasingly frail and running out of time. The team, led by NYPD Deputy Inspector Robert Lukatch, was able to locate them and freed them from the rubble Tuesday.

The good news spread fast. Lynn Downey heard it by e-mail from her firefighter husband, Joe Downey, who is on the rescue team. He told her they had to be very careful getting the children out.

"I'm just really, really proud of him," Lynn Downey said. "We can't wait for him to come home."