Port-au-Prince, Haiti - Fifteen days after an earthquake devastated this nation, a teenage girl was rescued from the rubble of her house - weak and thirsty - on a hillside in the capital.

Hundreds of Haitians shouted with joy Wednesday as rescuers pulled Darline Etienne from a jumble of concrete and steel, wrapped her in a gold foil emergency blanket and hurried her into an ambulance. She said she had been in the shower when her house collapsed. A spokesman for the French team that rescued her said, "We think she's been in there since the quake."

Darline's relatives said she was 17.

"It's a miracle," said Christopher Smith, a British police chaplain who offered the girl a wooden cross. When she was too weak to take it, he used a necklace to wrap it around her hand.

"She's breathing pretty weakly. She's very dehydrated, but she will be fine," said Christopher Renou, one of the French rescuers. "We're very optimistic that she will be fine."

It was the second remarkable rescue in the Haitian capital in the past 24 hours and may have marked one of the longest stretches of survival on record in any natural disaster. In a nation that has counted its dead by the tens of thousands, Darline's survival provided a rare moment of pure happiness.

The rescue came after more than five hours of digging. It began when a group of young men were picking their way along the hillside and heard a voice.

"I said, 'Is someone here?' " Roosevelt Luc recalled.

"Yes," Darline said. "I am alive."

It was unclear how Darline managed to survive. Staying alive 15 days without food is possible but without water is unlikely.

Researchers have documented credible reports of post-disaster survival of up to 14 days. But "no live finds were documented in any earthquake after 14 days had elapsed," Anthony Macintyre, an emergency medicine physician at George Washington University, and his co-authors wrote in a medical journal after a 2006 study.

Luc and three friends began chopping at the collapsed house about 2:15 p.m., grabbing tools - a sledgehammer, a pickax, a saw, a pail - that were handed to them by people living nearby.

Only a few passersby watched at first as the men dug a trench 4 feet deep and about 2 ½ feet wide. They sawed and pulled at steel bars of reinforced concrete.

As the men worked, the thin crowd of observers gave them water, cigarettes and a Coke, which they shared in the 90-degree heat. Occasionally, one would stop to wipe the sweat dripping from his face.

After 30 minutes, Luc could see Darline, pinned beneath a piece of metal. He lifted his head and called in Creole to the crowd, by then numbering about 50, "Give me something sweet!"

People passed a peppermint and packets of sugar down to Luc, who handed them to the girl.

Luc then asked the girl her name. She said that it was Darline and that she had been taking a shower at 5 p.m. Jan. 12 when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake brought her house down.

"Please help me," she told him.

As people heard the name, they spread it from one bystander to another in the growing crowd: "It's Darline, it's Darline."

About 3 p.m., a team of Haitian and International Committee of the Red Cross workers appeared. Darline offered a friend's phone number to a rescuer, who relayed it to a Haitian Red Cross worker.

"We have Darline," the worker said. "She is not dying."

An hour later, the French rescue team arrived. Several rescuers jumped into the hole, pushing aside Luc and his friends.

A pair of Haitian police officers joined Luc, his friends and the rest of the French team in a bucket brigade, passing battered blue and white pails filled with pieces of concrete and bits of dirt.

One of the French workers grunted as he tried to pull aside a piece of reinforcing bar. He squirmed into the hole and emerged to say he would need to break through a layer of concrete to reach the girl.

Luc handed him a pickax.

Shortly after 5:30 p.m., as the sun began to set, a French rescuer slid Darline out of the dark, narrow hole and into the arms of another rescuer, who placed her on a stretcher.

Men lifted the stretcher, and the crowd, now more than 400 strong and blocking both sides of the street, broke into cheers. One man, crying and smiling at the same time, was wearing a green T-shirt that read: "Feeling lucky?"

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Staff writer David Brown contributed to this report.