Haiti earthquake: It sounded like a tornado, followed by a bomb, Alpharetta man says

“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 the buildings around the palace have been destroyed.

People slept on the streets, under trees, last night. But Florestal said the aftershocks – reports give as many as 28 – continued to shake the ground over night, keeping everyone awake.

“We slept on the ground, so we felt it,” he said.

The earthquake jammed phone lines and wiped out power, making communication next to impossible. Florestal contacted the AJC and was able to make other phone calls using Vonage, the brand name for the phone system that uses broadband Internet. He spent the early morning trying to contact other family members.

After that, priority No. 1 is to recover the bodies of his cousins and other family members.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. Florestal said recovery will take more than a year.

“We need tractors, we need everything,” Florestal said. “Anybody who had a home around the palace, it’s gone.”