Cook Survives 14 Days in Quake Rubble : Philippines: He tried to commit suicide before his rescuers found him in the shattered hotel.

A cook entombed for 14 days with corpses in the rubble of an earthquake-shattered hotel said he tried to kill himself before he was pulled from the rubble today.

“I thought I would not make it. I don’t think I could have lasted one more day,” said Pedrito Dy, 27, who survived two weeks without food by drinking his own urine and drips of rainwater.

“I tried to commit suicide several times by banging my head against the concrete beams because I could not take it any more,” he told reporters before being flown to a hospital in Manila.

Dy was the third survivor found in the last four days under the rubble of the Hyatt Terraces Hotel in Baguio, 120 miles north of Manila. A man and a woman entombed for 11 days in an elevator shaft of the hotel were rescued Friday.

The hotel was among dozens of buildings toppled by a strong earthquake that hit the northern Philippines on July 16, killing at least 1,650 people in Baguio and nearby provinces.

“My pillows were the broken arms and the corpses of my dead companions,” doctors at a Baguio hospital quoted Dy as saying after his rescue.

“You could say this is a miracle because he had no food for two weeks and yet survived,” said Rogelio Bay-an, a doctor at the Baguio General Hospital where Dy was being treated.

Dy, who was suffering from dehydration and bruises, said he did not think any of the 60 or so people whom hotel officials believe are trapped in the ruins could be alive.

“I think I’m the last person they would get alive from the hotel,” Dy said.

Dy, a cook who doubled as a body-building instructor at the hotel, said he was working out in a gym with 11 people in the hotel basement when the earthquake struck.

Nine of his companions were killed immediately, and the two others died of injuries over the weekend just before rescue came.

“Suddenly they (the two) stopped talking. It was then that I knew they were dead,” Dy said.

Foreign rescue experts left Baguio a week ago saying there was no chance of finding anyone trapped in the ruins alive.