Seconds after the Haiti earthquake struck, Dan Woolley of Colorado Springs wasn’t thinking about the girders and concrete slabs falling around him. His attention last January 12 was on a patch of bright sky seen through a doorway to the hotel’s outside staircase.

“Everything stopped for a second, and I saw the hotel’s archway outside break and fall.” Woolley said last week.

In a moment the doorway vanished, everything went black and Woolley was entombed within the collapsed Hotel Montana.

In “Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana,” Woolley’s book with Jennifer Schuchmann on sale Jan. 6 at most book stores, he recounts his 65 hours in an elevator car beneath tons of concrete and steel.

Woolley used the first-aid app on his iPhone to help treat his gashed leg and keep himself from going into shock. He drank his urine, something he learned from a survival TV show, to stave off dehydration.

He used his camera flash for light, leading him to the safe haven of a steel-fortified elevator where he awaited rescue.

During the ordeal, Woolley wrote good-byes to his wife, Christy, and two children, ages 6 and 3, in a blood-smeared journal.

His emotions whirled from resolve to despair.

Hours before his rescue, his mental faculties were slipping away.

“I felt a thick blanket of blackness covering my mind like a shroud, trying to snuff out all rational thought,” Woolley writes in “Unshaken. “I couldn’t make any sense of where I was or what was happening to me. I was in hell.”

This is not merely a literary flourish. “I do believe there are spiritual battles in life,” Woolley said. “But I had a breakthrough with God during the experience, and Satan wanted to take that away.”

Woolley, 40, is a website developer for Compassion International, a worldwide Christian child outreach based in Colorado Springs.

Woolley and David Hames, a Colorado Springs freelance videographer, were in Haiti last January shooting a video to show the aid the organization was bringing to impoverished Haiti children.

Woolley and Hames, who had never met before the assignment, were staying at the Hotel Montana. They had wrapped a day of filming and were walking through the hotel’s lobby when the quake struck.

Hames, an arm’s length behind Woolley, was killed instantly when the lobby’s ceiling fell.Woolley has had his mental ups and downs since the magnitude 7.0 quake, which killed 240,000 people. Though there’s been no post traumatic stress, he’s had nightmares and suffered some survivor’s guilt.

Every day he thinks about Hames, he said. 

“I knew him only for a short time,” Woolley said, “but it was a very rich time. I feel like I lost a friend.”

Woolley has learned to deal with the death of Hames, a husband and father of two who ran a video production company.

“I could ignore the loss, but that’s not healthy. I could also allow the loss to limit the celebration,” Woolley said.

“I’ve decided to hold both equally — fully acknowledge the loss and fully celebrate my rescue.”

Woolley has deepened his relationship with his wife and children over the last year. He also feels closer to God and considers his rescue a miracle.

Woolley cites about a dozen happenings during his ordeal that he believes show’s God’s stamp — from his finding the elevator car to his use of the first-aid app.

“These things were not just coincidences,” Woolley said. “It’s easy to identify God’s hand in it.”He considers it a miracle that his leg had no infection when it was examined in a Miami hospital 72 hours after it was gashed to the bone.

On the anniversary of the quake, Woolley plans to be in Haiti to resume the video project for Compassion.

“There are a lot of good things that have happened for children in Haiti since the quake,” he said. “We want to document that.”—For more from Woolley and excerpts from his book, go to Barna’s blog, The Pulpit, at www.thepulpit.freedomblogging.com.

Dan Woolley rescued in Haiti last January Photo by RICK LOOMIS, LOS ANGELES TIMES