GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colorado — When a 7.0 earthquake struck the impoverished nation of Haiti on Jan. 12, one of the many tales of tragedy and triumph involved a family with ties to the Roaring Fork Valley.

A mission school in Haiti, founded by a couple with friends and relatives in Glenwood Springs, was one of the uncounted buildings that collapsed when the earthquake hit the island.

There were 58 people in the three-story mission school at Carrefour, a town about 15 miles west of Port au Prince, according to Al and Linda Stoltzfus of Glenwood Springs. Only 11 survived.

One couple, Rodney Smoker and his wife, Lillian, and their infant son, Jeremiah, were on the second floor when the walls began to tremble.

Rodney Smoker is a nephew of the Stoltzfuses — his mother, Darlene, is sister to Al Stoltzfus and is married to the mission school's founder, Lloyd Smoker.

In an online video (http://vimeo.com/9053324), Rodney and Lillian Smoker recount, in sometimes graphic detail, the quake and its aftermath in the community of Carrefour (pronounced, kar-foo).

The town, located about 10 miles west of the capital, Port au Prince, lies roughly midway between the quake's epicenter and the capital city.

According to Lillian Smoker, it was the evening of “a beautiful sunny day” when Rodney, on an impulse he recalled as somewhat mysterious, climbed from the ground floor to their second-floor quarters in the school, having scooped up their son on his way.

As they were talking, she recalled, the quake struck.

“There was absolutely no warning,” she said. “The concrete walls just started to shake,” and soon the entire building was trembling violently.

Suddenly, Rodney said, the concrete slabs that served as floors, ceilings and the roof of the different stories began what is known as “pancaking,” or falling intact, one on top of the other, as the supporting walls collapsed.

“This 30-foot building just sandwiched into 10 feet,” he remembered.

The Smokers fell to the floor on impact, and were left in a space of about one and a half to two feet deep, stunned but together and alive.

As the temblor subsided, Rodney could see a bit of light at an unknown distance and started digging for it, even as he could hear cries for help and screams of pain emanating from the surrounding rubble.

“I heard Guimps (his adopted brother) yelling ... people that I'd grown up with, they were just screaming ... screaming each other's names,” he told the unseen audience in the video.

For as much as 45 minutes, with occasional aftershocks shaking the rubble even as he tunneled through it, he inched forward.

Lillian, crawling behind with Jeremiah, would hand the wailing infant to Rodney as Rodney gained ground. Then Rodney would reach back and haul Lillian forward so they would stay together, until they finally broke through.

“We ended up coming out through the third floor,” Rodney recounted, although he was not sure how they had passed through the ceiling/floor from the second to the third story.

For the rest of that night and much of the next day, Rodney Smoker told his audience, he and others who had gotten out quickly spent hours and hours getting to, and extricating, any survivors they could find.

Visibly haunted by the memories, the Smokers told how they were expecting to free Rodney's Haitian adoptive brother, Guimps (pronounced “gimps”).

“I kept thinking, ‘Guimps is gonna be next, Guimps is gonna be next,'” Rodney said.

But after hours of digging and hauling, the 11 people they managed to pull from the wreckage did not include Guimps, who with his wife, Sophie, died that day.

Rodney said the dead and dying were everywhere in the wake of the disaster, and people ended up sleeping out in the open for fear of further damage from aftershocks.

“We slept with a dead man beside us that night,” he said.

Within days, said Al Stoltzfus, the survivors were directing their own relief effort to bring supplies, people and materials for the rescue and recovery efforts, and ultimately to begin the long task of rebuilding the community and the school.

Rodney Smoker, Stoltzfus said, has a vast network of friends among the missionary community in the Caribbean and the U.S., and has arranged for private flights of supplies for the Carrefour relief effort, since most of the initial international aid was focused on the situation in the capital city.

The Stoltzfuses, who for 15 years ran the old Colonial Inn in West Glenwood (at one point the name changed to America's Best Value Inn) said Lloyd and Darlene Smoker and other family members have spent considerable time in Glenwood Springs. They would come here to run the lodge for weeks at a time while Stoltzfuses went on vacations, occasionally to Haiti. The Smokers have met, and are friends with, a number of locals in Glenwood Springs.

There is a strong bond between the Stoltzfus family and the Haiti Family, as the mission school and its members are known, and there will soon be a team of relief workers heading down to Haiti from here.

“We're recruiting a lot of young bucks, guys who are lean and wiry, and can climb through rubble,” reported Linda Stoltzfus. “It's a work team that's going down.”

Along with the strong backs and arms of the work team will be a team of nurses from Valley View Hospital, which already has sent Dr. Bob Derkash and a nurse, Lynn Roe, to help with the relief effort.

The nurses and the workers are expected to travel directly to Carrefour, although they might get involved in other recovery efforts as well.

Alice Sundeen, speaking on Feb. 5 from Valley View, said Derkash and Roe were due back soon from a two-week mission to Haiti, perhaps as early as Feb. 6 or 7.

The nurses and the work team were expected to leave later this month.

jcolson@postindependent.com