Ruminations

Surviving Stark Adversity

"While we were searching for him early on, he might have been walking away from us. Usually, by the third day, you're lucky if you find someone alive. All the creeks are dry at the moment. That country out there is very unforgiving. There are snakes and wild pigs and dingoes. If you are weak and lying down, they will get you. We were all saying, 'We have to find him today. We have to find him today'."
William Morris, commander, local emergency services, Australian outback

Sam Woodhead, eighteen years of age, from Britain and temporarily in Australia, went out for a run. He was, after all, young and well-conditioned and a health fanatic. Living at Upshot Station, an isolated farming property, known for its harsh geology and dreadful heat. He was lost in the Australian Outback throughout three days of 40-degree-C temperatures.

He did what many a child has done living anywhere in North America in isolated communities; went for a run, with the intention of returning fairly expeditiously. Except for the fact that he was unable to distinguish identifiable environmental characteristics that would aid him in retracing his steps to return to the place where he'd set off.

After his ordeal, wandering about roughly ten kilometres from the farm he set out from for a full ten days without food or water, he was understandably weak and dehydrated, and confused. Perhaps if he had been with someone else it might have helped; two minds are always better than one for devising strategies that might have aided survival.

He'd had a litre of water with him as he set out for his run and that lasted for his first hour out in that remote heated wilderness. He survived, his rescuers said, by drinking saline solution meant for his contact lenses. How much saline solution can he have had with him? If he'd been able to somehow snare a bird, a snake, a wild pig, he would have been able to survive. Fortunately for him he managed to survive anyway.

The excellent physical condition he was in before his trial is being attributed to his survival, though he lost quite a bit of weight. Ten days, however, isn't two months in the searing cold of the winter Andes where nothing lives to be snared and eaten in desperation. And while there was abundant frozen water there when a Uruguayan plane transporting 45 people, part of whom represented a youthful rugby team crashed, eating snow for rehydration cools core body temperature at a time when the body is urgently attempting to maintain it.

There was a roar of the engines and the plane vibrated as the Fairchild tried to climb again; it rose a little but then there came a deafening crash as the right wing hit the side of the mountain. Immediately it broke off, somersaulted over the fuselage, and cut off the tail. Out into the icy air fell the steward, the navigator ... followed by three of the boys still strapped to their seats. A moment later the left wing broke away and a blade of the propeller ripped into the fuselage before falling to the ground.
Inside what remained of the fuselage there were screams of terror and cries for help. Without either wings or tail, the plane hurtled toward the jagged mountain, but instead of being smashed to pieces against a wall of rock it landed on its belly in a steep valley and slid like a toboggan on the sloping surface of deep snow.
The speed at which it hit the ground was around 200 knots, yet it did not disintegrate. Two more boys were sucked out the back of the plane; the rest remained in the fuselage as it careered down the mountain, but the force of deceleration caused the seats to break loose from their mountings and move forward, crushing the bodies of those caught between them and smashing the partition which separated the passenger cabin from the forward luggage area. While the freezing air of the Andes rushed into the decompressed cabin and those passengers who still had their wits about them waited for the impact of the fuselage against the rock, it was the metal and plastic of the seats which injured them.

Of the original 45 people aboard the plane en route to Chile for a rugby match, sixteen mostly teens survived. 72 days after the crash that took the lives of a quarter of the passengers, and a subsequent avalanche that smothered another eight to death, two of the survivors managed despite their feeble physical and mental condition, to clamber their way toward a green valley in Chile, out of the cordilleras where they had been imprisoned for over two months.

Their fine physical condition prior to their dreadful ordeal is considered to be the reason of their survival, along with luck and their good fortune that a handful among them were courageous and inventive, taking the initiative to bring order out of chaos and retain life out of a situation leading to certain death.

Eighteen-year-old Sam Woodhead experienced his ordeal in searing heat in the Australian outback, the survivors of the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes managed to survive in conditions inimical to any form of biological life.