SAVING STUART DIVER

INSIDE THE CELEBRATED RESCUE OF THE TRAGEDY’S SOLE SURVIVOR, AND THE PERILOUS RECOVERY OF THE VICTIMS

- Michael Crooks

Even before his world came crashing down around him, Stuart Diver had always been claustrophobic. But when pinned under slabs of concrete and twisted metal after a landslide brought down the lodge where he was living with his wife, Sally, in Thredbo, NSW, panic was not an option.

“When you’re in a total position of no control, you get to a point of calmness,” Diver told WHO in 2012. “Because you can’t do anything about it. It took me five minutes to work that out. There was nothing I could do to get myself out.”

That job was up to an intrepid team of rescuers. It is 25 years since the Thredbo landslide, an unprecedented disaster in Australia that claimed 18 lives, including Sally Diver, 27.

The tragedy, which was caused by a leak from a water main on a slope in the Snowy Mountains town, saw the collapse of two lodges late on the evening of July 30, 1997, including the Brindabella Ski Lodge where ski instructor Diver, 27, and Sally, a reservations manager at the local ski resort, lived. The pair had been asleep in their apartment when the landslide hit, and within 30 seconds Sally drowned in a surge of ice-cold water beside her husband.

The disaster galvanised the nation, as TV networks streamed footage of rescuers searching for survivors and bodies within the rubble and ruin. “The hopes of all Australians are with the rescue teams as they carry out the dangerous task of searching for any survivors,” said the Prime Minister at the time, John Howard.