Search on for more survivors after four found alive

Although devastated by a recent earthquake, spirits in Haiti are lifted as - nearly a week after the earthquake struck - remarkable stories of successful rescues continue to emerge.

Since the earthquake struck last Tuesday, over 1,700 rescue workers working in one of 43 teams have rescued more than 70 people.

Three rescued from under supermarket

Rescuers pulled out four people from under rubble overnight Sunday, including three at a supermarket where at least two more people might have survived in air pockets under five stories of pancaked concrete reports NBC.

A girl, a boy and a woman were rescued at what had been the five-story supermarket.

The woman was identified as Mireille Dittmer, a Haitian-born US resident who was on a business trip in Haiti when the quake hit.

One official coordinating the rescue efforts there told Sanders that a text message believed sent from under the rubble indicated that "more than 60" people were alive there.

Although officials said that number was probably a mistake - or the likelihood at least, of 60 being alive under the rubble, rescuers had located two more people and were working to free them.

Samer Tahmoush, the supermarket's manager, said that there would have been around 75 to 100 shoppers inside the market in the upmarket Delmas neighbourhood when the quake hit.

The supermarket, one of the biggest in Port-au-Prince, collapsed on itself, its upper layers falling on those directly below.

"It's a really consolidated collapse, what we call a pancake collapse," Jose Mendia, and American rescue worker said.

US and Turkish urban rescue teams have also said they could hear two distinct groups of people deep inside the sandwiched rubble of the Carib Market says NBC.

Co-owner of an upmarket hotel saved

In another rescue, the co-owner of the Hotel Montana was pulled out from under the rubble of what had been a luxury hotel.

Nadine Cardoso was dehydrated but otherwise uninjured.

"It's a little miracle," said her husband Reinhard Riedl. "She's one tough cookie. She is indestructible".

Twelve hours after the rescue effort began, with more than 20 friends and relatives of the prominent community member watching early Sunday, Cardoso was lowered from a hill of debris on a stretcher.

The rescue was bittersweet for Cardoso's sister.

Rescuers told Gerthe Cardoso they had to abandon a search for her 7-year-old grandson when an aftershock closed a space where he was believed to be.

"Well, we can't have them both," Cardoso said after her sister was saved.

- NZ HERALD STAFF