Within three days of the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12, Bartlett J. McCartin, a Chicago-based vice president and partner of National Investment Services Inc., was on the ground helping in Port-au-Prince.
Mr. McCartin — who once trained and served as a firefighter — is experienced with disasters.
Within 28 hours of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he was at ground zero, in a hopeful search for survivors of the World Trade Center collapse.
In the aftermath of the Katrina hurricane, he spent a total of three weeks on three trips to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf coast in search-and-rescue and rebuilding.
Mr. McCartin, who works in client services at Milwaukee-based National Investment Services, a unit of Titanium Asset Management Corp., said of his mission to Haiti, “Our job was to do what we could to help folks in some of the most deplorable conditions I ever saw or could imagine. ... Anywhere you turned, you could have helped out.”
In all his search-and-rescue work in Haiti, his group pulled out only one survivor, in a building collapse at a university. “He was in pretty rough shape,” Mr. McCartin said.
Through networking, Mr. McCartin learned a medical team from Dallas-based Forest Park Medical Center bound for Haiti had space on its flight. In Port-au-Prince with the medical team, Mr. McCartin helped set up an open-air field operating room in a parking lot outside a severely damaged hospital. Also, he helped move patients in and out of the field triage and operating room in the parking lot, as well as performing first aid. — Barry B. Burr
