5 Amazing situations people should not have survived

We have a pretty good understanding about what the human body is capable of surviving. We know exactly how much food, water and oxygen we need and the limits of injury it’s possible to recover from, so when a story comes up about a 3-year-old who survived without water for almost four days or someone who fell further than the distance of a mountain and survived, it piques peoples interest. Here’s a few of the most incredible situations people have managed to survive when all others wouldn’t.

Ayda Gezgin – 3 Years old and buried in rubble

Turkey has recently had a huge earthquake (30/10/20) that measured 7.0 in magnitude and flattened hundreds of buildings. During this, a number of people were buried in the rubble and crushed to death, but many were also trapped and injured, left hoping someone finds them quickly. After 91 hours of searching through the rubble, rescue teams heard the cries of a child and began digging, only to find 3-year-old Ayda Gezgin who had been trapped there with no food or water for just under 4 days. Apart from a few small cuts and bruises, she was completely unharmed and waved to the rescuers when she saw them. She asked for some water and her favorite yogurt drink and was taken to hospital where she made a quick recovery.

(One of the collapsed buildings from the recent 7.0 magnitude earthquake)

Hugh Glass – An American frontiersman who crawled 200 miles after a bear attack

This man’s story was the inspiration for the 2015 film The Revenant staring Leonardo DiCaprio. Glass was an experienced explorer and in 1823, he joined the “General Ashley expedition” into the upper Missouri River region, an area that was largely unexplored at the time. During the expedition, Glass was hunting game in the forest when he was attacked by a large grizzly bear that badly mauled him and left him close to death. He managed to kill the bear but when the others found him, they were sure he wouldn’t make it and left him for dead with the bear skin laid over him like a funeral covering. Glass survived though and managed to crawl and stumble 200 miles to fort Kiowa in South Dakota with wounds that should have killed him.

(An old drawing of Hugh Glass, the toughest frontiersman in American history)

Vesna Vulović – Fell 6.3 miles and survived

Vesna Vulović holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 m (33,330 ft; 6.31 mi). Working as a flight attendant she made so many flights it became second nature, and they were all safe and normal until one day on the 26 January 1972 when the flight she was on had a bomb on board. Halfway through the flight a bomb hidden in a suitcase exploded and split the plane in two, sending the front end in one direction and the tail in another. Vesna was trapped behind a food cart in the tail section but eventually became free and was sucked out the plane, falling to earth with nothing on her but an attendants uniform. For the next 6.3 miles she fell to earth before landing hard on the ground, but she claims she passed out at the time of the explosion and remembers nothing of the fall. She had many broken bones and bleeding on the brain, but after a long and intense recovery period she was able to walk again and lived to the age of 66.

(Vesna Vulović still holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute)

Truman Duncan – Cut in half and left for 45 minutes

Truman Duncan was a train worker who one day managed to lose his footing and fell off a moving train. Unfortunately he landed such a way that caused him to fall into the wheels, and he was pulled beneath the train which ran him over at the waist. Because the train weighed several hundred tons, it cut right through Duncan but managed to stop before it had passed over him, leaving one of its wheels on top of where his waist used to be. Instead of passing out or immediately dying, he pulled out his phone and called 911 himself before making a few calls to his family. The rescue team took 45 minutes to arrive and free Duncan, and it’s thought he only survived because of the way the train wheel was positioned over him, keeping his organs inside his body. He lost half of his bodies blood supply but after a couple dozen surgeries, managed to make a full recovery, minus his legs, pelvis and a kidney.

Roy Benavidez – Stabbed, shot and blown up

Roy Benavidez was a member of the US special forces and was deployed to Vietnam during the war. One day when a group of 12 people from his unit were out on patrol, a group of over 1,000 infantry from the North Vietnamese people’s army attacked them, causing them to call for help over the radio. Roy Benavidez heard this call and without thinking jumped onto the responding helicopter as fast as possible, leaving his rifle behind in the rush. He was armed with only a knife and a medical bag, but this didn’t stop him rushing through heavy gun fire to his wounded comrades. Over the next 6 hours he would evacuate and save the lives of 8 of his companions, even though he suffered wounds well beyond anything that could kill a man. During the fighting he was constantly running to his comrades to try and drag them to safety, and ended up getting shot 37 times because of it. He was also stabbed by a bayonet and received multiple shrapnel wounds from grenades and mortars. After eventually getting on to the evacuation helicopter, he was taken back to base and sent to the medical tent on a stretcher where the attending physician claimed there was no way he’d survive, but Benavidez heard this and spat in the doctors face, after which he was treated and made a full recovery. He died in 1998 at the age of 63 and earned the Medal of Honor for his actions.

(Roy Benavidez at an award ceremony with President Ronald Reagan)