Death of a remarkable survivor

Vesna Vulović, aged 66, died in her Belgrade apartment over Christmas. Nearly 45 years earlier she had fallen 33,000 feet from a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 that blew up over the Czech Republic en route from Stockholm to Belgrade.

Vulović, a flight attendant, was the only survivor among the 28 people on board. She was trapped in the tail as the aircraft plummeted to a mountainous area, and it is thought that pine trees and the snow softened the impact.

The Serbian woman was rescued by a woodsman who heard her screams. She was rushed to hospital after suffering a fractured skull, two crushed vertebrae and a broken pelvis, ribs and legs, but eventually made an almost complete recovery. Vulović’s fall would feature in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest anyone had ever survived without a parachute.

For a long time it was suspected the DC-9 had been brought down by a bomb on board, but in recent years a new theory emerged that it had been shot down by mistake by the then Czechoslovak air force.

(For other stories of remarkable escapes, see my posts of 4 July 2009, 16 January 2010, and 22 March 2011.)

Great disasters - great escapes

 

With a death toll of more than 1,120, the fall of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh is now confirmed as the deadliest building collapse in modern history, but in the midst of terrible tragedy, there was an astonishing story of survival.

Nineteen year old Reshma Begum was pulled from the rubble alive after being trapped for 17 days.  Rescuers had spotted her waving an aluminium curtain rail.   Reshma had come to the big city from the countryside three years ago, and had been working at her factory in the Rana Plaza for less than a month when the block collapsed.  

Three years ago, a 24 year old man was dragged out of the remains of a hotel eleven days after the Haiti earthquake, and 17 days after the collapse of the Sampoong department store in Seoul, South Korea, in 1995, an 18 year old was found alive.

In 1906, nearly 1,100 miners were killed by an explosion in a colliery at Courrieres in France.   To the astonishment of rescue workers, 20 days later, a group of 13 survivors emerged.    They had kept themselves alive on food that miners took down the pit to eat during their breaks and by slaughtering a horse.

*My third video on Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters is a story from Scotland - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKR5Ayyx6cs