Photojournalist Ivanoh Demers looks back on surviving and photographing the Haiti earthquake

Ivanoh Demers was editing video in his Port-au-Prince hotel room for a story aboutHaitian-bornauthor Dany Laferrirehe was working on for La Presse.

Thenthe earthquake struck.

It felt like a major explosion. But the shaking didn't stop.

"Everything ... is five feet away from where it was one second before," saidDemers, describing what he witnessed in an interview with CBCin the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in human history.

Demerssaid he started to run, cutting his feet on shardsof broken glass. He wentback to his room, threw on his shoes and leapt down the hallway and down three flights of stairs as walls trembled.

Objects around him were flungto the ground. The floor undulatedbeneath his feet.

He made itoutside. The hotel was to his left, and a standof palm trees was to his right. He ran toward the trees.

"It was a good call, because the whole building collapsed basically beside me," said Demers,a photographer for La Presse at the time whonow works for Radio-Canada.

• Rubble and rage come together in Haiti to highlight slow pace of disaster recovery

He found himself standing among some Haitians, who, like him,had escaped. They were praying, "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!"

And though Demers doesn't consider himself religious, he joined in.

"I looked at the skies and said, 'My God, this has got to stop.' You know, and it did."

It was 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12, 2010. The earthquake had lasted35 seconds.

"The worst 35 seconds of my life," Demers said.

At least 250,000 lives were lost.The lives of so many others were profoundly altered.

The shaking went on,with violent aftershocks in thehours and days that followed.

Demers found his colleague, journalist ChantalGuy, and they got to work helping people in the area. Darkness soon fell, withonly the headlights of idling cars to illuminaterescue efforts.

Demers spotted a United Nations truck and ran toward it.

He persuaded the UN peacekeepersto let him use their satellite phone for exactly one minute. He called his employer, figuring theywould be able to let his family know he had survived.

"I basically told La Presse I was alive. I was screaming and incoherent, but they understood I was in a state of shock," he said.

Demers's colleagues tracked down a Quebecer living in Port-au-Prince, Jean-Franois Labadie, and asked him to help out Demers and Guy.

A couple hours later, Demers heard someone shouting his name. It was Labadie walking the streets, looking for the two journalists. Demers realized Labadiemust have an internet connection.

"That's when I switched. I said, 'Give me 15 or 20 minutes.'"

Demers says he went from survival mode to work mode, and he began shooting pictures 11 in total, that first night.

He would only realize later that they"were published the next morning basically everywhere around the world."

His photographs were on the cover ofTIME magazine and on the front pages of the New York Times and the Guardian:ayoung father carrying his son out of the rubble.

Abadly injured five- or six-year-old boy who'd managed to climb out from under a collapsed building.Another father and his daughter.

Chaos reigned. Cries and screams rang out through the night.

"Nobody, nobody, nobodyno Haitians slept in a house. Everybody slept in the streets. We slept in the streets," Demers said.

The next day and in the two daysthat followed, Demerswas in full gear.

"I made it through three days of working like crazy," he said. "I learned later that I was pretty much in shock."

As the third day wound to a close, Demers says he began to shut down. La Presse brought him back home. So began his journey to recovery.

"It's very important to have a lot of empathy and to understand what Haitians are going through,"Demers said."I came back after seven days, and people took care of me."

"But they stayed there."

"And they're still there. And they're still in the rubble, and people are still in very difficult conditions."

• Politicians moved to tears by Anglade's commemoration of Haiti earthquake

Demers will be attending the Maison d'Hati'scommemoration of the disaster's 10th anniversarySunday at the Tohu. He's been back to Haiti five times since 2010, and he says he hopes to continue to make the trip when he can.

Every year since the tragedy, he heals a little more.

"I'm lucky to be alive, so I'm living my life fully, and that's something that's very, very important to me."