A man who was entombed under three concrete slabs with just a few centimetres to breathe for 65 hours has detailed how the ordeal was only the start of decades of trauma. Ski instructor Stuart Diver was 27 when the house he was living in with his wife was caught up in landslide that crushed their home and killed 18 people. Their home, Bimbadeen Lodge in New South Wales, Australia, was struck by 4,000 tonnes of mud at 11.35pm on the night of July 30 1997. It had been slammed into by a two storied building known as Carinya Lodge that had also been caught up in the slide.
Carinya Lodge hit the three story concrete constructed Bimbadeen Lodge and trapped Stuart and wife Sally inside. Despite his best efforts to stop it from happening, Sally died during the incident. For the next 65 hours, Stuart fought the sheer weight of the debris on top of him alongside freezing conditions and the mental pressure to survive. In his book ‘Survival’, published in 2012 he detailed the experience and also spoke to the Guardian about how he felt about the trauma that occurred when he was just 27.
He described what it was like to be entombed inside the crushed building in just his boxer shorts and talked about how the immediate aftermath of his survival affected his ability to process what had happened. He told the publication: “I look at that 27 years on and I can't work out how I survived. I was in so much physical pain from the cold.”. When he was eventually rescued, Stuart said he felt elated and wanted to celebrate, but when he realised he was the only survivor he decided to keep emotions to a minimum in case he upset the families of the deceased.
He said: "I already had my own loss with Sally but when you magnify that with all the other people that was a big burden. That first six months definitely took a toll on my mental health. I never got a chance to grieve properly. For me, that emotional side, at that point, was very much a personal thing. If I wanted to cry, that was for me to cry.”. As he continued to attempt to recover from what happened to him physically and emotionally, Stuart turned to alcohol and it was during this difficult period he met Rosanna Cossettini, who had been a part of the Thredbo community that he and Sally had lived amongst when they moved to New South Wales in 1997.
The pair started dating two years later and later married before they were struck by another tragedy, when Rosanna was diagnosed with breast cancer. Surviving several rounds of brutal treatment, she eventually went into remission. What’s more, after tragically losing one child at 10-and-a-half weeks, the pair welcomed a daughter called Alessia. However, soon afterwards, Rosanna was given a metastatic cancer diagnosis from which she was told there would be no recovery.
Stuart cared for Rosanna for 11 years before she died, but admitted he was grateful to have had the opportunity to say goodbye, something which he had been denied when he lost his first wife Sally. Despite his multiple traumas, Stuart says he will not let what happened to him define him. He added: “The great opportunity of my life - coming through these multiple traumas - is that they've all taught me so much.”.
