If you are curious to know the secrets of the world’s most extraordinary survivors and if you wish to become a person who does not give up hope and beats the odds in the wake of a tragedy, keep on reading. I shall introduce you to some of the remarkable men and women who are members of “The Survivors Club.”
This book is a real page-turner: The true-life stories are absolutely compelling and there is a lesson to learn in every single one of them. The author, Ben Sherwood, is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. He was also executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America.” While he was working as senior broadcast producer of NBC Nightly News, he remembers the amazing footage of Sofia Xerindza. This courageous woman escaped the deadly floodwaters of the Limpopo River in Mozambique by climbing into a tree where she gave birth to a baby girl.
“In this book, you’ll meet survivors of every imaginable ordeal, young and old, rich and poor, the guy down the street and people in the news. I’ve gathered tales on every continent; if you can conceive of a crisis, I’ve probably interviewed someone who has gone through it and come out on the other side,” said Sherwood.
In the first pages, we learn that one of the rules of the Survivors Club is that you are probably stronger than you know. In the midst of a crisis, you can discover hidden capabilities that you never knew existed. This was the case of Angela Cavallo, a 145-pound grandmother who never lifted weights nor went to the gym. One day, in 1982, her son, Tony, was underneath his Chevy Impala. The car was up on cinder blocks and a jack when suddenly, it came crashing down and Tony was struck unconscious. Cavallo saw her son’s legs sticking out from underneath, so she immediately reached under the car and grabbed hold of the metal fender. The Impala weighed 3,450 pounds, but Cavallo managed to lift it a few inches to “take the pressure off “ her son who emerged unscathed from the accident. “Adrenaline went through my body and you just do it,” explained the grandmother of two girls.
Interestingly enough, two American scientists in 1960 analyzed the forearm muscles of people under significant pressure. They discovered that flexor power with the help of stimulants like adrenaline or amphetamines could increase up to 31 percent. In fact we have more strength than we think, but we are hardly ever required to use that force.
Paul Barney is another member of the Survivors Club. He survived the sinking of the Estonia, a car ferry, in the Baltic Sea. When he was rescued after spending the night on a life raft, his core temperature was 82 degrees — just four degrees below the usual point of losing consciousness. Death comes at 80 degrees.
At 1 a.m. on September 29, 1994, Barney was sleeping on a bench of the cafeteria on the deck when he woke up to a sudden bang. The ship was tilting to the right. Tables and chairs were sliding, dishes and glasses were crashing everywhere. With no emergency instructions from the captain and the crew and no visible lifesaving equipment, Barney realized how desperate the situation was. However, instead of seeing people screaming and fighting for the lifeboats, he noticed that people were not moving: “They were frozen to the spot, almost waiting to be told what to do.”
He concentrated on finding an escape route and decided to climb onto the massive overturned hull of the Estonia. At that point, he clearly remembers how happy he was to have escaped from inside the ship, which was about to sink. Of the 989 passengers aboard, 852 were trapped in cabins or corridors and never had a chance.
Surrounded by 30-foot waves and 60-mile per-hour winds, Barney saw passengers trying to inflate a life raft at the other end of the ferry. As he walked slowly to the bow, he was very careful not to fall into an open window, which would draw him right back into the drowning ship. After helping the group of passengers inflate the life raft, he jumped in the pitch-black sea and managed to pull himself up and drag some others aboard. Looking back on what happened during that tragic night on the Baltic Sea, Barney believes the line separating life and death in that boat was very thin: “The overwhelming desire is to put your head down on the nice soft side of the life raft and fall asleep. And that’s instant death…I was very calculating. I had to keep myself alert and awake at least, and I was always looking out for the next thing that was going to save my life”.
Barney tied himself to the raft because he didn’t want to go overboard and he concentrated on slowing his breathing and reducing his heart rate. The results were immediate. “It helped clear my head and I could start thinking and functioning again. I just felt I hadn’t achieved everything I wanted to do in life, and there was no way I was going to fall asleep and die of hypothermia in the middle of the Baltic,” he says.
When the rescue pilots arrived on the scene, they noticed that most of the forty life rafts were empty and of the 16 people who were with Barney in the life raft, only six were saved.
Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht, whose goal is to understand why so many people freeze to death, explains: “ if you decide you are going to die, you tend to panic and then you do things that are more likely to bring about a negative result. Some 95 percent of the people who die in cold water aren’t actually hypothermic. Their body temperature is practically normal. They are not killed because of the cold but it’s the terror that leads to drowning and heart attacks.”
One of the first rules of survival in a plane crash is to be aware of a concept known as “Plus Three/Minus Eight,” which refers to the first three minutes of flight and the last eight minutes. Eighty percent of all plane crashes take place during those eleven minutes. Therefore, during the first three minutes and the last eight, we should be ready to run for our life.
We should also memorize where the emergency exists are located and count how many rows away they are. Professor Ed Galea, a leading authority on fire safety, discovered that survivors usually move an average of five rows before they escape a plane on fire. The passengers most likely to survive are sitting right next to the exit or one row away. Incidentally, one of the most amazing survival stories is Vesna Vulovic’s six miles free fall. On January 26, 1972, the 22-year-old flight attendant was handing out meals when a bomb hidden in the luggage exploded. The DC-9 was ripped apart. Everyone died except for Vesna. She was rescued from the wreckage, her two legs sticking from the fuselage. Her spine, legs, pelvis and ribs were broken. Within a year, she was walking and had returned to a desk job. To this day, she holds the record for surviving the longest fall without a parachute.
Another individual whose survival is utterly magical is that of a Sherpa named Pasang, a Nepalese porter accompanying a team of climbers from New Zealand in 1992. This was his first expedition to Mount Everest. Working without a safety line, he fell 80 feet into a crevasse. Rescuers managed to tie a rope to his waist and pulled him up. At first, Pasang seemed in good health but he suddenly collapsed and was immediately taken to base camp at 17,559 feet. Dr. Kamler, one of the world’s outstanding expedition doctors, was waiting with a surgical bed built from rocks. When Pasang arrived, his face was bloated, his eyes were swollen and he was in a deep coma. Kamler treated him with oxygen and IV fluid, but there wasn’t any more he could do as brain surgery was not an option. At that point, the other Sherpas began to sing for their friend.
Dr. Kamler described it as “a rumbling sound that seemed to emanate from the great mountain itself… This rhythmic chanting was reaching Pasang, resonating deep inside his head, perhaps harmonizing with his brain waves…This effect might be powerful enough to reverse a shutdown.”
People never survive such an injury, let alone on the frozen side of Mount Everest, but Pasang miraculously recovered. The chanting had released an energy, a formidable will to live, and this had reversed his medical condition.
French born, Jeanne Louise Calment who holds the Guinness world record for the longest life — 122 years and 164 days — is another member of the Survivors Club. She learned how to fence at age 85, rode her bike at 100, and lived on her own until she was almost 110. At 121, she released CDs with her thoughts set to rap, techno and regional music. “Always keep your smile,” she once said. “That’s how I explain my long life. I think I will die laughing.”
“The Survivors Club” explores the nature of survival and the resilience of the human mind and body. Enlightening and hopeful, these fascinating and true stories will change your way of thinking and also help you overcome life’s most difficult challenges.
