(CNN) -- At first, Kip Scheidler said he felt the ground tremble. Then the roof began to shake. Tiles tumbled from the ceiling as people bolted from their chairs to escape. When Scheidler tried to follow them, he could barely keep his balance as the ground wobbled. "The weird thing is that afterward you will swear that it lasted 20 minutes but it really lasted 60 seconds," Scheidler said of the earthquake tremors. "But at the moment, it seems like it will never stop, and it keeps getting stronger." That's how Scheidler remembers one of the most horrific moments in his life -- the 1986 earthquake in El Salvador that killed 1,500 people. All those memories came flooding back recently when Scheidler turned on CNN and saw images from this week's earthquake in Haiti, which may have killed at least 100,000 people, according to initial estimates.
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Disaster witnesses reflect on painful lessons learned
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Destruction on vast scale brings out the best and worst in human nature
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Leadership from inside the community is essential in recovery
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Man who survived El Salvador earthquake recalls examples of human resiliency
For people like Scheidler, the news from @placeholder isn't abstract.
Scheidler, the survivor of the @placeholder earthquake, has seen the same resiliency.