The earthquake in Haiti shattered a three-story concrete house into 4 feet of dusty rubble, leaving two children trapped at the bottom.

For days, their father funneled water through a thin PVC pipe to the parched mouths of his son, 8, and daughter, 10.

Finally, two firefighters from Orange County — Capt. Steve Spall of Circleville and Jason Faso of Walden — arrived. Their elite rescue unit was there to save the children.

First, Spall, with a degree in civil engineering, made sure what remained of the building was safe to enter. Then Faso chipped away at the rubble with a jackhammer.

After four sweaty hours, Spall and Faso had helped save two young lives — two of six Haitians they would help rescue during their two-week stay in January.

"You walk away as a team, feeling there's six people alive because of you," says Faso, who, like Spall, is as modest as you can be about a "job" that actually saves lives.

As members of New York City's Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue unit, Spall and Faso have explored the rubble of some of the country's most horrific disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, the Oklahoma City bombing and worst of all, the World Trade Center attacks. That's where Faso had to lie on the body of a fallen firefighter — with a name tag on his chest — to try to rescue someone else.

But the firefighters have never seen anything like what they saw in Haiti.

"There was a level of poverty you can't imagine," says Spall, who with Faso spoke about Haiti Friday night at their parish, St. Paul's Roman Catholic Church in Bullville.

The average pay in Haiti is $2 per day, or about $730 per year.

People bartered for a cell phone charge from a generator with pieces of charcoal.

And thousands live in shanties with rusty tin sheets for roofs and blankets for walls.

On top of that poverty, Spall and Faso saw the dead, or what remained of the dead — like a bloated hand lying on a slab of concrete.

When you ask Spall and Faso how they get back to daily living after so much death, they shrug and talk of putting their experiences away.

"It's a terrible camaraderie we share," says Spall.

But they also talk about how much it meant in Haiti, when they learned, through e-mails, that the folks at St. Paul's were praying for them.

And when Spall returned to Orange County at 6 a.m. Jan. 23, he slept for just three hours so he could attend Mass at the brick church.

When he got there, the guy in the pew in front of him was the same guy who had crawled through the rubble to help save the children — Jason Faso.

sisrael@th-record.com