I was trapped for 65 hours under 4,000 tons of rubble – and felt an amazing calm

Emma Russell

Feb. 11, 2025, 10 a.m.

In 1997, the ski lodge where Stuart Diver lived with his wife, Sally, was destroyed by a landslide. She was one of 18 people who died and he was the sole survivor. He describes the pain, fear and long, winding path of recovery

Stuart Diver woke up to a roar that sounded like a low-flying plane. The floor was shaking. The windows rattled. It was 11.35pm and 4,000 tons of mud, building and debris was hurtling down the mountainside in Thredbo, New South Wales, towards Bimbadeen Lodge, where he had been asleep with his wife, Sally. In a few short seconds, the ceiling of their apartment caved in and they were entombed by the concertinaed building. Diver fumbled around in the pitch black room for a way out, cutting his hands and feet on broken glass. But there was nowhere to go.

“I heard the noise and put my head up, but as I rolled forward the wrought iron headboard came down and pinned Sally to the bed.” Freezing cold water from a broken mains water pipe on the road above them soon started “flying around”. Diver found a small pocket of air to breathe by arching his back and tilting his head up. He tried to cover Sally’s mouth to stop her from drowning but he couldn’t save her. “Sal dying in my hands will stay in my mind forever,” he wrote in his 2012 book, Survival.