Miracle chapter 3.pdf

Chapter Three A Promise ' I I , THE AREA OF THE CRASH NaJ;\TR @ ~:".il.! a UIP..IRlCA "OLCAN:O 4;100 Ft. '4·, "iii> ~ - ;~ ="'- I I I SLEPT VERY LITTLE that first mght out of the coma, and as I lay awake m the frigid darkness, it seemed that dawn would never come. But at last a thm light slowly brig...

Chapter Three A Promise ' I I , THE AREA OF THE CRASH NaJ;\TR @ ~:".il.! a UIP..IRlCA "OLCAN:O 4;100 Ft. '4·, "iii> ~ - ;~ ="'- I I I SLEPT VERY LITTLE that first mght out of the coma, and as I lay awake m the frigid darkness, it seemed that dawn would never come. But at last a thm light slowly brightened the windows of the fuselage, and the others began to stir. My heart sank when I first saw them-their hair, eyebrows, and lips glistened with thick silver frost, and they moved stiffly and slowly, like old men. As I began to rise, I realized that my clothes had frozen stiff on my body, and frost had clumped on my brows and lashes. I forced myself to stand. The pam inside my skull still throbbed, but the bleedmg had stopped, so I staggered outside the fuselage to take my first look at the strange white world into which we had fallen. The morning sun lit the snow-covered slopes with a hard white glare, and I had to squmt as I surveyed the landscape surroundmg the crash site. The Fairchild's battered fuselage had come to rest on a snow-packed glacier flowing down the eastern slope of a 1nassive, ,ce-crusted mountam. The plane sat with its crumpled nose pomting slightly down the mountamside. The glacier itself plunged down the mountain, then streamed off into a broad valley that wound for miles through the cordillera until it disappeared into a maze of snow-capped ridges marching off to the eastern horizon. East was the only direct10n m which we could see for any great distance. To the north, south, and west, the view was blocked by a stand of towering mountains. We knew we were high m the Andes, but the snowy slopes above us rose up even higher, so that I had to tilt my head back on my shoulders to see their summits. At the very top, the mountams broke through the snow cover m black peaks I I 50 I Nanda Parrado shaped like crude pyramids, colossal tents, or huge, broken molars. The ridges formed a ragged semicircle that ringed the crash site like the walls of a monstrous amphitheater, with the wreckage of the Fairch1ld lymg at center stage. As I surveyed our new world, I was so baffled by the dreamlike strangeness of the place that at first I struggled to convince myself it was real. The mountains were so huge, so pure and silent, and so profoundly removed from the reach of anything in my experience, that I simply could not find my bearings. I had hved all my life in Montevideo, a e1ty of one and a half million people, and had never even considered the fact that Cities are manufactured things, butlt with scales and frames of reference that had been designed to suit the uses and sensibilities of human bemgs. But the Andes had been thrust up from the earth's crust millions of years before human bemgs ever walked the planet. Nothing m this place welcomed human hfe, or even acknowledged its existence. The cold tormented us The thin air starved our lungs. The unfiltered sun blmded us and blistered our hps and skm, and the snow was so deep that once the morning sun had melted the icy crust that formed on its surface each night, we could not venture far from the plane without sinking to our hips in the drifts. And m all the endless mtles of frozen slopes and valleys that entrapped us, there was nothing that any hving creature could use as food-not a bird, not an msect, not a smgle blade of grass. Our chances of survival would have been better if we'd been stranded m the open ocean, or lost in the Sahara. At least some sort of life survives m those places. During the cold months m the high Andes, there is no life at all. We were absurdly out of place here, hke a seahorse in the desert, or a flower on the moon. A dread began to form m my mmd, an unformed thought that I was not yet able to verbalize: Life is an anomaly here, and the mountains will tolerate that anomaly for only so long From my very first hours m the mountams, I felt, deep in my bones, the immediacy of the danger that surrounded us. There was I MIRACLE., IN THE ANDES \ 51 never a moment I did not feel the realness and closeness of death, and never a momeut m which I was not gripped by pnmal fear. Still, as I stood outside the Fairchild, I could not help myself from bemg swept away by the awesome grandeur all around us. There was incredible beauty here-in the hugeness and power of the mountams, in the windswept snowfields that glowed so perfectly white, and in the astounding beauty of the Andean sky. As I looked up now, the sky was cloudless, and it crackled with an mdescent shade of cold, deep blue. Its eene beauty left me awestruck, but like everything else here, the vastness and emptmess of that endless sky made me feel small and lost and 1mpossibly far from home. In th1s primeval world, with its crushing scale, its lifeless beauty and its strange stlence, I felt awkwardly out of joint with reality in the most fundamental sense, and that scared me more than anythmg, because I knew in my gut that our survival here would depend on our ability to react to challenges and catastrophes we could not now even imagme. We were playmg a game agamst an unknown and unforgivmg opponent. The stakes were terrible-play well or die-but we didn't even know the ground rules. I knew that in order to save my hfe I would have to understand those rules, but the cold white world around me was offering up no clues. In those early days of the ordeal, I might have felt more grounded 111 my new reality if I remembered more of the crash. Because I'd blacked out in the earliest stages of the accident, I had no recollect10n of anything until I came to my senses three days later. But most of the other survivors had been conscious for every second of the disaster, and as they recounted the detatls of the crash, and the de~perate days that followed, I realized it was a miracle that any of us were alive. I remembered the fhght through Planch6n Pass, where we traveled in cloud cover so heavy that visibility was nearly zero and the pilots were forced to fly on instruments. Severe turbulence was tossmg the plane around, and at one point we hit an air pocket that 52 / Nando Parrado forced the plane to drop several hundred feet. This rapid descent diopped us below the clouds, and that was probably the moment when the pilots first saw the black ridge nsing dead ahead. Immediately they gunned the Fairchild's engines in a desperate effort to climb This effort managed to raise the plane's nose a few degreespreventmg a head-on collision with the ridge, which, at a crmsmg speed of 230 miles per hour, would have reduced the Fairchild to shreds-but their act10ns were too late to lift the plane completely over the rnountam. The Fairchild's belly slammed mto the ndge at roughly the pomt where the wmgs met the body, and the damage was catastrophic First the wings broke away. The nght wmg spiraled down into the pass The left wmg slammed back against the plane, where its propeller sliced through the Fairchild's hull before it, too, plunged mto the rnountams. A split second later the fuselage fractured along a !me directly above my head, and the tail section fell away. Everyone sittmg behmd me was lost-the plane's navigator, the flight steward, and the three boys playing cards. One of those boys was Guido In that same mstant, I felt myself lifted from my seat and hurled forward with mdescnbab]e force, as if some giant had scooped me up like a baseball and hurled me with all his might. I remember slammmg mto sornethmg, probably the bulkhead between the passenger cabm and the cockpit. I felt the wall flex, then I lost consciousness, and for me the crash was over. But the others still faced a ternfymg nde as the fuselage, stnpped of its wmgs, engines, and tail, sailed forward like an unguided missile. Here we were blessed with the first of many miracles. The plane did not wobble or spiral Instead, whatever aerodynamic pnnciples govern such thmgs kept the remams of the Fairchild flymg upnght long enough to clear yet another black ndge. But the plane was losing momentum, and at last the nose dipped and it began to fall. Now the second miracle saved us, as the Fairchild's angle of descent matched almost exactly I MIRACLE IN THE ANDES \ 53 the steep slope of the mountain onto which we were falling. If this angle had been JUSt a few degrees steeper or shallower, the plane would have cartwheeled on the rnountam and slammed to pieces. But instead it landed on its belly and began to rocket down the snow-covered mountainside like a toboggan. Passengers screamed and prayed out loud as the fuselage raced down the slope at a speed of two hundred miles per hour for a distance of more than four hundred yards, finding a fortunate path between the boulders and rocky outcrops that studded the mountain before slamming into a huge snow berm and corning to a sudden, violent stop. The forces of the colhs10n were huge. The Fairchild's nose was crumpled hke a paper cup. In the passenger cabin, seats were ripped loose from the floor of the fuselage and hurled forward along with the people sittmg in them, and dashed agamst the cockpit bulkhead. Several passengers were crushed instantly as the rows of seats closed on them like the folds of an accordion, then tumbled into a mangled heap that filled the front of the fuselage almost to the ceilmg. Coche Inciarte, one of the team's supporters, told me how he grasped the back of the seat m front of him as the plane streaked down the mountain, waiting to die at any second. After the impact, he said, the fuselage rolled slightly to the left, then settled heavily 111 the snow. For moments there was nothmg but stunned silence, but soon the qmet was broken by soft moans, and then sharper cries of pam Cache found himself lying m the tangle of seats, unin1ured and amazed to be alive. There was blood everywhere, and the arms and legs of motionless bodies stuck out from under the compressed jumble of seats. In his confus10n, his attention was drawn to his tie, which, he saw, had been shredded to threads by the force of the wmd generated during the Fairchild's wild slide down the mountain. Alvaro Mangino remembered bemg forced beneath the seat m front of him at the final impact. As he Jay trapped on the floor, he heard moaning and crying all around him, and he I 54 / Nanda Parrado MIRl).CLE IN THE ANDES \ 55 especially remembered bemg baffled by the appearance of Roy Harley, who seemed to have turned bright blue. Later he would realize that Roy had been soaked in airplane fuel. Gustavo Zerbmo was sitting next to Alvaro. He explained that in the first impact, when the plane hit the mountain ridge, he saw the seat m which Carlos Valeta was sittmg rip loose from the floor and disappear mto the sky. As the fuselage skidded down the slope, Gustavo stood and grabbed the luggage rack above his head. He closed his eyes and prayed. "Jesus, Jesus, I want to hve!" he cried. He was certain he was about to die. Miraculously, he was still standing when ,he plane smashed mto the snowbank and heaved to a sudden stop. So it's true, he thought, you are still thinking after you are dead. Then he opened his eyes. When he saw the wreckage in front of him, he mst111ctively took a step backward, and immediately sank to his hips 111 snow Looking up, he saw the ragged line of the fracture where the tail sect1011 had broken away from the fuselage, and he realized that everythmg and everyone behind him had disappeared. The floor of the fuselage was at the level of his chest now, and as he pulled l11mself back up into the plane, he was forced to chmb over the motionless body of a middle-aged woman. Her face was bruised and covered with blood, but he recognized her as my mother. Gustavo, a first-year medical student, bent down and took her pulse, but she was already gone. Gustavo moved forward in the fuselage toward the pile of seats. He pned one of the seats from the pile and found Roberto Canessa he immediately took control. His first action was to orgamze the umn1ured boys and set them to work freemg the passengers who had been trapped under the heap of wrecked seats. This was laborious work. The force of the crash had crumpled the seats into an impossible tangle, with each seat interlocking with others in clusters too heavy to move. Many of the survivors were athletes, in top physical cond1t10n, but still, as they struggled to wrench and pry the seats apart; they found themselves gaspmg for breath in the thm mountain air As passengers were pulled, one by one, from the wrecked seats, Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbmo assessed their condition, and did their best to tend to their inJuries, some of which were gnsly. Both of Arturo Nogueira's legs had been broken m several places. Alvaro had a broken leg, and so did Pancho Delgado. A sixmch steel tube had impaled Enrique Platero's stomach hke the pomt of a spear, and when Zerbino yanked the tube from his friend's gut, several mches of Platero's intestines came out with 1t. The inJury to Rafael Echavarren's right leg was even more gruesome. His calf muscle had been ripped off the bone and twisted forward so that it hung m a slippery mass across his shin. When Zerbmo found him Echavarren's leg bone was completely exposed. Zerbino, swallowmg his revuls10n, grabbed the loose muscle, pressed 1t back m place, and then bandaged the bloody leg with strips of someone's white shirt. He bandaged Platero's stomach, too, and then the qmet, st01c Platero immediately went to work freemg others who were trapped m the seats. underneath. Canessa, also a medical student, was not in3ured, and As more and more passengers were pulled from the wreckage, withm moments Roberto and Gustavo began pulling more seats from the pile and tend111g, as well as they could, to the inJured passengers they freed. At the same time, Marcelo Perez was pulling himself from the wreckage. Marcelo had hurt his side 111 the crash, and his face was the "doctors" were amazed to see that most of the survivors had suffered only mmor miuries. Canessa and Zerbmo cleaned and bandaged their wounds. They sent others, with mjunes to their arms and legs, out onto the glacier where they were able to dull their pain by cooling their limbs m the snow. Each unmjured sur- brmsed, but these m;unes were mmor, and as our longtime captain vivor who was freed from the seats became another worker, and 56 / Nanda Parrado 57 soon the workers had freed all of the trapped passengers except for me no chance of surv1v1ng, so he and Zerbino moved on, saving one, a 1n1ddle-aged woman named Sefiora Mannari. The sefiora their efforts for the ones they believed they could help. There were moans coming from the cockpit, but the cockpit door was still hopelessly barncaded by the wall of toppled seats, so Canessa and Zerbino had to step outside the fuselage and struggle through the deep snow to the front of the plane, where they were able to chmb up through the luggage compartment and mto the cockpit. There they found Ferradas and Lagurara still strapped m therr seats. The plane's final impact with the snowbank had crushed the Farrchild's nose and forced the instrument panel into their chests, pinning them against the backs of their seats. Ferradas was not travelmg as part of our group. Instead, she was travelmg to her daughter's weddmg 111 Chile, and had purchased llckets on this flight directly from the air force as an 111expens1ve way to make the tnp. In the crash, her seat back had collapsed forward, pressing her chest forward against her knees and pinnmg her legs back beneath her seat Other seats had fallen on top of her, burying her beneath a pile so heavy and wickedly tangled that no amount of effort could free her. Both of her legs were broken, and she was screaming in agony, but there was nothmg anyone could do for her. And there was nothmg to be done for Fernando Vasquez, one of the team's supporters. When Roberto checked on him in the first moments after the crash, he seemed dazed but unharmed, and Roberto moved on. When Roberto checked again, he found Vasquez dead 111 his seat. His leg had been severed below the knee by the plane's propeller when it slashed through the hull, and in the time Roberto was away from him, he had bled to death. Our team doctor, Francisco Nicola, and his wife, Esther, had been flung from their seats and were lymg dead, side by side, at the front of the passenger cabm. Susy was lymg beside my mother's body. She was consoous but mcoherent, with blood streammg over her face Roberto wiped the blood from Susy's eyes and saw that rt was coming from a superfioal scalp wound, but he suspected, correctly, that she had suffered much more serious internal mjuries. A few feet away they found Panchito, bleedmg from the head and rambling 111 sem1consc10usness. Roberto knelt beside him and Panchito took Roberto's hand, beggmg him not to leave. Roberto cleaned the blood from Panchito's eyes, comforted him, then moved on. In the front of the plane he found me lymg senseless, my face covered 111 blood and black brmses, my head already swollen to the size of a basketball He checked my pulse and was surprised to see that my heart was still beatmg. But my mjunes seemed so grave that he gave I MIRACLE IN THE ANDES \ was dead. Lagurara was conscious, but gravely mjured and m tern- hie pam. Canessa and Zerbino tned to pry the instrumental panel off the copilot's chest, but it wouldn't budge. "We passed Curic6;' Lagurara muttered, as the doctors tried to help him, "we passed Cuneo:' Canessa and Zerbino managed to remove the cushion of his seatback, and this relieved some of the pressure on hrs chest, but there was not much more they could do for him. They fed him some snow to ease his thrrst, then they asked if they could use the Fairchild's rad10. Lagurara told them how to set the dial for transm1ss1on, but when they tried to send a message, they found that the radio was dead. Lagurara begged for more snow, and the doctors fed it to him, then they turned to leave. As he realized the hopelessness of hrs situat10n, Lagurara pleaded with the boys to brmg him the revolver he kept in his flight bag, but Canessa and Zerbino ignored him and headed back to the passenger cabm. As they climbed down from the cockpit, they heard Lagurara murmunng, "We passed Curic6, we passed Cunc6..." Back in the fuselage, Marcelo was working out some grim calculat10ns in hrs head. We had crashed at three-thirty m the afternoon. He guessed it would be four o'clock before officials could confirm that the plane was mrssmg. By the tnne they could organize a helicopter rescue, it would be five-thrrty or six The helicopters 58 / Nanda Parrado would not reach us until seven-thirty at the earliest, and since no pilot m his right mind would fly m the Andes at mght, Marcelo knew no rescue would be launched until the following day. We would have to spend the night here. Daylight was already fading. The temperatures, which were already well below freezing when we crashed, were droppmg fast. Marcelo knew we were not prepared to weather a subzero mght m the Andes. We were dressed only in hght summer clothmg-some of us were weanng blazers or sports jackets, but most of us were in shirtsleeves. We had no warm coats, no blankets, nothing to protect us from the savage cold. Marcelo knew that unless we found a way to turn the fuselage mto a decent shelter, none of us would last until morning, but the plane was so full of jumbled seats and loose debris that there wasn't enough clear floor space for the mjured to he down, let alone provide sleeping room for dozens of unmJured survivors Reahzmg that the clutter would have to be cleared from the fuselage, Marcelo set to work. First he gathered a crew of healthy survivors and gave them the task of removing the dead and injured from the fuselage. They began dragging the dead out mto the open, usmg long nylon straps they'd found in the luggage compartment. The mJured were carried out more gently, and once they were laid on the snow, Marcelo d1rected the survivors to clear as much floor space as they could The workers labored valiantly to follow his orders, but the work was gruelmg and excruciatmgly slow. They suffered from the fngid wind and gasped for breath in the thin air. By the tune darkness fell, they had cleared JUS! a small space near the gapmg hole at the rear of the fuselage. At six o'clock, Marcelo directed the others to move the mJured back mto the fuselage, then the healthy survivors filed in and prepared for the long mght ahead. Once everyone was settled, Marcelo began to bmld a makeshift wall to seal off the huge opemng at the rear of the fuselage where tl1e tail sect10n had broken away. With Roy Harley's help, he stacked smtcases, fragments of the aircraft, MIRACLE IN THE ANDES \ 59 and loose seats in the opening, then he packed the gaps with snow. It was far from airtight, and the air temperature m the fuselage was still v1Ciously frigid, but Marcelo hoped the wall would shield us from the worst of the subzero cold. When the wall was finished, the survivors settled in for the mght. Forty-five passengers and crew members had been on board the Fa1rchild. There were five known dead at the crash site. Eight were unaccounted for, although the survivors felt certam that one of them, Carlos Valela, was dead. Zerbino had seen Valeta's seat fall from the plane, but, incredibly, he had survived his fall In the moments JUS! after the crash, a group of boys had spotted him staggering down the mountam slope a few hundred yards from the Fairchild. They called to him and he seemed to turn toward the crash site, but then he stumbled in the deep snow and tumbled down the slope and out of sight. This left thirty-two people ahve at the crash site. Lagurara was still trapped m the cockpit. Some of the mJured, along with Liliana Methol, the only unmjured woman survivor, were gathered m the shelter of the Fairchild's luggage compartment, which was the warmest part of the plane. The rest packed into a cramped space on the litter-strewn floor of the fuselage that measured no more than eight by ten feet square. Because mght had fallen so quickly, there hadn't been time to remove all the bodies, and the survivors were forced to hunker down among the dead, shoving and prodding the corpses of fnends for a few more inches of space. It was a scene from a nightmare, but the fear and physical suffering the survivors were endurmg overshadowed their horror. The tight quarters were intensely uncomfortable, and despite Marcelo's wall, the cold was unbearable. The survivors huddled together to share the warmth of the1r bodies. Some of them begged the boys near them to punch their arms and legs to keep the blood flowing in the1t veins. At some pomt, Roberto realized that the cloth covenngs of the seats could easily be unzipped and removed and used as blankets. 60 I Nanda Parrado They were made of thin nylon and offered little protection against the cold, but Roberto understood the nsks of hypothermia, and knew the survivors had to do everythmg they could to conserve as much body heat as possible. Even 1f the blankets would not prevent anyone from suffenng in the cold, they might help them retam enough body heat to survive until morning. They laid me beside Susy and Panchito at the base of Marcelo's wall. This was the coldest part of the cabm. Wmd leaked through the makeshift wall, and the floor below us, which had been torn away 111 the crash, allowed cold air to stream up from below, but they placed us here because they had already given up hope that we would live very long, and they saved the warmer places for those who had a chance to survive. Susy and Panchito, who were still conscious, must have suffered ternbly that first night, but I was still 111 a coma, and was spared that agony. In fact, the frigid air may have saved my life by reducing the swell111g that would have destroyed my bra111. As the mght grew deeper, the cold bore down on the survivors, chillmg them bone-deep and crushing their spirits. Each moment was an etermty, and as the last light faded, 1t was as 1f the mountain darkness were seep111g into the survivors' souls. All the purposeful work they had done m the afrermath of the crash had kept them from dwell111g on their fears, and the physical act1V1ty had helped them keep warm. But now, as they lay helpless in the dark, there was noth111g to protect them from the cold or, worse, from the despalf. Survivors who had performed stoically 111 the daylight now wept and screa1ned m pam. There were savage bursts of anger as one boy shifted pos1t1on m the cramped quarters and bumped the 111jured leg of another, or someone umntentionally kicked someone else as he tned to sleep. The moments crept by. At some po111t, Diego Storm-another medical student m our group-saw somethmg 111 my face that made him think I 1mght hve, so he dragged me away from Marcelo's wall to a wanner place MIRACLE IN THE ANDES \ 61 111 the fuselage, where the others kept me warm with their bodies. Some managed to sleep that night, but most simply endured, second by second, breath by breath, as sounds of suffenng and delusion filled the darkness. In a thin voice, Panchito pleaded pathetically for help, and constantly muttered that he was freez111g Susy prayed, and called for our mother Senora Mariam screamed and wailed 111 her agony. In the cockpit, the rav111g copilot begged for his gun, and insisted, over and over,