Thoughts are with the people of Italy who were effected by last night's earthquake.
In a macabre coincidence, last night when I was trying to fall asleep, for some reason I was thinking about Stuart Diver. He survived a landslide at Thredbo village and ski resort in Australia in 1997. He was rescued after spending 65 hours trapped between two concrete slabs, in icy water in subzero winter temperatures. The whole nation was focussed on the disaster and on his rescue when it happened, and he made a number of TV appearances afterward, so his story was top of mind for the whole country for a long time.
They don't go into this detail in the Wikipedia pages, but I remember him describing the space in which he was trapped being partially filled with water, so that if he lay relaxed his face was under the surface. He had to reach his face up out of the water to take a breath of air. For 65 hours.
His wife, who had been laying beside him in bed when the landslide occurred, did not survive but drowned when she was trapped underwater.
Some attributed his survival to the fact that he was young and, as a ski instructor, extremely fit. I seem to remember him saying something like, "What else are you doing to do?" Of course he reached up and took a breath every few minutes. For 65 hours.
For some reason that story in its detail recurred to me last night, and seeing the news today, it would have been just around the time the earthquake in Italy occurred.
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