Luckiest People Who Survived The Impossible - Part 3

Some people have truly survived the impossible. Whether the jaw-dropping circumstances are final-destination style car accidents, 133 days stranded at sea or 30 minutes on the seabed without any oxygen. Let's find out how these incredibly lucky people had their bacon saved when the odds were truly stacked against them!

Danny Balch

If you’re looking for danger, camping out next to an active volcano is one sure-fire way to find it. Back in 1980, Danny Jay Balch and his friend Brian Thomas were camping in a meadow near Mount St. Helens when they were jolted awake at 8:32 a.m. by an intense rumbling sound. When the pair looked out of the tent window, their worst fears were confirmed: an eruption was heading their way.

As they dashed for the treeline, Balch was hit by a blast of heat and a shower of ash, mud and ice that caked him and grit and pushed him flat to the ground. In those few seconds, his entire body went from frozen to baked, as the extreme heat melted the skin off his fingers. When he came to, Balch called out for Thomas and managed to wade into the river to soothe his burns.

As he resumed his search and began scrambling through fallen trees, he suddenly felt a hand on his left shoulder that took him by surprise. When he looked down, he was shocked to see Thomas under a tangle of tree limbs. Thomas had a broken hip, but Balch was able to pull him up just before the cloud of ash plunged the sky into darkness so that neither man could see just inches in front of them.

Miraculously two other campers in the group, Bruce Nelson and Sue Ruff, who had been toasting marshmallows at the time of the explosion, saw the two men and helped carry Thomas to the ruins of an old cabin, where they built a makeshift lean-to.

Balch then set off with the others to find rescue, and they were eventually spotted at about 6pm by two helicopters, but he didn’t forget about Thomas. Balch used a map to show them where his friend was, and the men were airlifted to hospital to recover. The worst part is that Balch had wanted to go to the beach that day but was convinced by Thomas to go camping at the volcano. Never give into peer pressure, guys!

Helen Klaben

The year was 1963, and then-21-year-old Helen Klaben was on the hunt for adventure. She’d left her hometown of Brooklyn to head for Hong Kong or India, but she had to reach San Francisco first, which meant getting a flight to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon territory.

Klaben was on a budget, so she decided to fly with an amateur pilot, 41-year-old Ralph Flores, in his single-engine plane instead, what could go wrong! The pair set off on February 4th, 1963, but not long into the journey Flores ran into a snowstorm and tried to take the plane above the clouds.

When he descended, he hoped to follow landmarks or the path of the Alaska Highway to reach Fort St. John, but instead he was met with mountains and trees. Before Klaben could understand what was going on, the plane crashed into a desolate stretch of wilderness near the Yukon-British Columbia border.

The pair miraculously survived, Klaben suffered a broken left arm and Flores a fractured jaw, but they were now stranded in sub-zero temperatures as low as -42C. The little food they had on board, a few cans of sardines, tuna, fruit salad, a box of saltine crackers and some vitamin pills, were rationed within 10 days, forcing them to make “soup” from melted snow.

The pair were able to create a shelter from a piece of tarpaulin and cushions from the plane, while they also fashioned a blanket from the plane’s carpet and used gasoline from the fuel tank to light a campfire that would keep them warm at night.

Eventually, Flores found a frozen pond and etched an enormous “SOS” sign with an arrow pointing to their campsite. On day 49 of their ordeal, Charles Hamilton, a pilot flying supplies to a nearby trappers’ cabin spotted, the “SOS” and rescued them. Klaben passed away in 2018 aged 76, but the story of her amazing survival will continue to live on in her 1964 book “Hey, I’m Alive!”

Juliane Koepcke

If you have a fear of flying, you might want to cover your ears for this one. On Christmas Eve, 1971, then-17-year-old Juliane Koepcke was flying over the Peruvian rainforest on LANSA Flight 508 with her mother when things took a turn for the worst.

The plane flew into a dark, violent storm which shook the entire cabin, before all the lights cut out and the aircraft went into a total nose-dive. Koepcke closed her eyes tightly and covered her ears to drown out the noise of passengers screaming and the deep roar of the engines, but suddenly it all stopped. The plane had disintegrated about two miles above the ground, and she was now in freefall, still strapped to her seat.

As the canopy of the jungle spun towards her, Koepcke blacked out just before impact. The next day, she awoke in the rainforest and realized she was totally alone. She was the sole survivor of the crash, but her ordeal still wasn’t over yet. She had a broken collarbone and some deep cuts on her legs, but Koepcke was able to walk until she found a stream to follow.

After being alone in the wilderness for 10 days, Koepcke found a small path to a hut with a palm roof. Nearby was an outboard motor from a large boat, and a liter of gasoline, which she used to treat a maggot-infested wound on her right arm. After spending the night there, Koepcke was awoken to the voices of men outside, who initially thought she was a water goddess from local legend.

After explaining her ordeal in Spanish, the men treated her wounds and took her back to civilization where she was reunited with her father. Koepecke told her amazing story in the 2000 documentary ‘Wings of Hope’ by director Werner Herzog, who coincidentally had a seat booked on that very flight before cancelling last minute!

Danie Pienaar

In 1998, Danie Pienaar was a research student studying the habits of white rhinos in the wild in the Phabeni tributary in South Africa, but this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity almost ended in tragedy. On one Thursday afternoon that January, Pienaar decided to head out on a tracking exhibition without telling his camp mates where he was going.

As he waded through the waters of a small stream, Pienaar saw something long and brown slithering in the nearby reeds. The next thing he knew, Pienaar felt a burning sensation on one side of his leg, just under the knee. After looking down and finding four bluish-purple holes and a drop of blood, his worst suspicions were confirmed: he’d just been bitten by a black mamba snake.

Black mamba venom is notoriously fast-acting as it shuts down the nervous system and paralyses victims, and without antivenom its fatality rate is 100%. Pienaar knew now that his only chance of survival was to make it back to his car and attempt the long trek back to the main town. Despite tying a tourniquet around his leg, the venom was already taking over his body as tunnel vision set in and his heartbeat sped up.

After feverishly making his way back through the wilderness, Pienaar reached his car and drove over 100mph down the road until he saw another car and forced them to stop. By the time they reached the hospital in Nelspruit, over two hours after he was bitten, Pienaar could no longer swallow or speak as paralysis set in. After several days on a ventilator Peinaar was released with nothing but the bite marks and one awesome story to tell!

Poon Lim

When Chinese native Poon Lim took a job as a steward on a British ship named the SS Ben Lomond, which was traveling from Cape town to Surinam during WW2, he probably never imagined that it’d earn him a world record for the longest time spent adrift at sea.

In 1942, a German U-boat came across the SS Ben Lomond 750 miles east of the Amazon and a pair of torpedoes sank it in two minutes flat. It happened so fast that most of the crew on board sunk with the vessel.

Of the total 55 crew members, Poon Lim would be the only survivor. As the ship sank, Lim managed to grab a life jacket and jump overboard just before the boilers exploded. After drifting aimlessly for about 2 hours, Lim spotted an 8-by-8 foot raft and hauled himself onto it.

The raft contained some meagre survival rations including tins of dried biscuits, 40 liters of water, a bag of sugar cubes, chocolate, an electric torch, and a handful of flares. But the food didn’t last long, and Lim had to improvise by taking the wire from the flashlight and making a fish-hook, which he fixed to the end of some hemp rope as a makeshift line.

He also fashioned a knife out of the biscuit tin which he used to kill sea birds, and then used the bird meat to catch sharks. As if that wasn’t bad-ass enough, Lim did all this without ever learning how to swim properly, in fact, he tied himself to the raft with rope to make sure he never fell off.

Poon Lim spent a grand total of 133 days at sea until three Brazilian fisherman spotted his raft on 5th April 1943 and rescued him. He’d lost nearly 20lb in weight, but was crucially alive. When Poon Lim was asked what he thought of his world record, he simply said: “I hope no one will have to break it”. Imagine going through an ordeal like that and still having a sense of humor about it.

Kootoo Shaw

Animal attacks are no laughing matter, and if there’s one creature you don’t want to face off against it’s a 400lb polar bear: just ask Kootoo Shaw. In September 2003, 46-year-old Shaw was working as a guide on a hunting trip in Kimmirut, Canada when things took a grizzly turn.

In the early hours of the morning, Kootoo and the captain of the Mayukalik Hunters and Trappers Organization awoke to find that the ceiling of their tent had been shredded as they slept. At first it looked like the tent had been filled with snow, but as their bleary eyes adjusted they realized it wasn’t snow, it was the white fur of the perpetrator, which was now looming over the men.

The captain immediately started running, and after failing to find a knife in the tent Kootoo joined him, but the fearsome polar bear was hot on their heels. Kootoo was about 4 paces behind the captain, but then the unthinkable happened: he tripped on a small rock, and before he knew it the 400lb beast came down on top of him.

The polar bear dragged Kootoo towards the ocean, then gouged its claws into his back and sunk its ginormous teeth into his head. Just when it looked like it was game over for Kootoo, the group’s cook grabbed a gun that belonged to one of the American sport hunters and shot the bear twice, killing the animal.

Amazingly, Kootoo never lost consciousness. When they finally reached the ER, three handfuls of sand were removed from the blood-clotted area around his skull, which may have saved his life by slowing down the bleeding. After 13 hours of intensive surgery Kootoo walked free with a new nickname in Kimmirut: “the polar bear man”.

Chris Lemons

In September 2012, Edinburgh-born saturation diver Chris Lemons was working in the North Sea, diving from his ship ‘the Bibby Topaz’ in a diving bell to repair oil rig structures.

One fateful day, Chris was lowered 91m in a diving bell, alongside colleagues Dave Yousa and Duncan Allcock, to fix a pipe on the seabed at the Huntington Oil Field east of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire. But this was almost one trip he didn’t return from.

During the repair, Chris heard an alarm sounding in dive control, which meant getting out of the structure and back to the diving bell as quickly as possible. What the men didn’t know was that the ship was moving away thanks to a failure in the computer which kept it in position. Then, disaster struck: Lemons’ umbilical cable became snagged on part of the metal structure.

This not only tethers divers back to the diving bell and the ship, but also provides them with breathing gas, hot water to keep the suits warm as well as light and electricity. With the 8,000-ton boat pulling in the opposite direction and Lemons basically acting as a human anchor, there was only one outcome: the umbilical cable snapped, plunging him 100m down toward the seabed.

Without it, Chris only had about five minutes of emergency gas stored in a set of normal diving cylinders on his back. He managed to find the structure they’d been working on and climbed on top of it, but the diving bell wasn’t there, and he’d already used up about 2-3 minutes of gas. The clock was ticking, and Chris accepted his fate and blacked out.

His colleagues put in a superhuman effort to locate him, but they were expecting to find a body, which is exactly what they thought when they found Chris laying on the floor of the rig. But after being hauled onto the diving bell and given two breaths, Lemons sputtered to life, 35 minutes after he had turned on his emergency supply of air.

With nothing to breathe for that long, Chris could’ve easily suffered brain damage, but the gas they breathe has a high concentration of oxygen which saturated his tissues and cells to allow him to survive. In just three weeks, this extremely lucky guy was even back working with his team again!

Coolidge Winsett

Popping to the toilet to drop off some timber probably isn’t top of your list of potentially life-threatening situations, but you can never be too safe: just ask Coolidge Winsett. Winsett is a 75-year-old retired janitor and WW2 veteran who lives in the very same home he grew up in in Southwest Virginia. The problem is the property hadn’t changed much over the years and there was no indoor bathroom, just a rickety old outhouse Winsett had built himself back in 1950.

That didn’t bother old Winsett: he’d been using it for years, and he didn’t think twice about paying it a visit one hot afternoon in August 2000. But while Winsett sat minding his own business, literally, the rotting floorboards below finally gave way, dumping the retired veteran into the filthy pit below.

Luckily for him, he was able to stay afloat after landing on the remains of the floorboards which acted like a makeshift raft. Unfortunately, Winsett had already been partially paralyzed by a stroke and was missing part of one leg, leaving him well and truly stuck.

As time ticked by, the 17-year-old mailman, the only regular visitor to Winsett’s property, noticed that the mail had started piling up, so he decided to investigate. Luckily, he discovered Winsett after following his weakened cries and the old man was rescued by the fire department after three whole days in the pit. Now that’s one seriously crappy ordeal.

The Robertson Family

On 27th January 1971, the Robertson family from the village of Meerbrook in Staffordshire, U.K. set off from Falmouth, Cornwall on a voyage to parts unknown. Retired merchant naval officer Dougal Robertson had purchased a 43foot wooden schooner called Lucette which would be perfect for the educational adventure he had planned with for wife Lyn, 18-year-old son Douglas, 17-year-old daughter Anne and twin sons Neil and Sandy, both 9.

Over the next year-and-a-half, the family sailed across the Atlantic, stopping at various Caribbean ports and taking in amazing sights all over the world. But on the 15th June 1972 the family encountered a pod of killer whales near the Galapagos Islands which launched an attack, damaging the boat beyond repair.

The family, plus a student hitchhiker they’d picked up named Robin Williams, managed to scramble on board an inflatable life board and dinghy. Once stranded, the group got by for 6 days on a few rations like biscuits, dried bread, onions, and fruits; but they eventually resorted to hunting turtles to eat and collecting rainwater to drink.

After 16 days the inflatable raft became unusable, so the six people crammed onto the 10ft long dinghy called the Ednamair, taking it in turns to sit in the dry part of the boat.

Finally, on 23rd July 1972, 38 days into their trip on the Ednamair, they were picked up after a Japanese Fishing Trawler named the Toka Maru II spotted their distress fire. Next time you fancy some family bonding time, just stick to the Scrabble.

Rooi Mahamatsu

As far as car accidents go, this one below has got to be something straight out of a nightmare. A spine-chilling photograph was taken in March 2014, after football player Rooi Mahamatsu, who plays for Johannesburg’s Orlando Pirates, had a narrow brush with death on the highway.

Mahamatsu had been driving his BMW 3-Series when the car slipped on a wet patch of road, causing him to lose control. Before he knew it, the entire vehicle was impaled by a guardrail that pierced the windscreen and exited through the back, all while miraculously missing the driver himself. Onlookers were shocked to see Mr. Mahamatsu walk away from the accident without a single scratch on him, someone up above must really have been looking out for him that day!

If you were amazed at these survival stories, you might want to check out part 1 and part 2! Thanks for reading.