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ATLANTA -- It sounded like a tornado, followed by a bomb dropping.
Then the noise under the ground started, Frantz Florestal said.
The metro Atlanta man was in his great-grandmother’s house, one that’s more than 100 years old, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city that was destroyed
Tuesday by a record 7.0 earthquake.
“You heard the noise under the ground, and it’s shaking and shaking, and everybody started running,” Florestal said. “Houses were falling and falling, all of the
fences were falling, people were falling, people were crying.”
Twenty seconds later, it was over, he said. There was nothing but rubble and dirt.
“You cannot see the air. All of the sudden it’s dark,” he said. “After that, you saw the sun, the sun was falling under the horizon.”
Florestal went to find his grandmother, a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who was in Haiti visiting family. Florestal emigrated to Brooklyn when he was 14. He moved to
Atlanta in 1999 and started event-promotions company Black Velvet Entertainment a couple of years later.
He also had been in Haiti since Dec. 21 and bought a return plane ticket to Atlanta two hours before the earthquake hit.
Florestal, 38, said his grandmother was basically unharmed. But his two cousins, 26 and 31, were buried in the rubble at St. Trinity, the school where they were studying to be electricians.
Sounds of Florestal’s aunt and other family members crying frequently overshadowed his own voice while being interviewed by a reporter.“Do you hear that? The rubble fell on them,” Florestal said. “They can’t take them out because there’s no help.”
St. Trinity is next to the presidential palace -- also called the White House -- in Port-au-Prince. Florestal said all of
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