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Haiti (CNN) --
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
some place 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."
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