Speaker 1: You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
Speaker 1: and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: You always hear the question what would you do if
Speaker 2: you had twenty minutes left to live? I found out twice.
Speaker 2: My name is Anily's Cochran. I survived a nuclear threat
Speaker 2: and a climate disaster, and this is my story.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
Speaker 1: of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
Speaker 1: forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
Speaker 1: accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Speaker 1: Mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to
Speaker 1: remind us all of our shared human condition. Please keep
Speaker 1: in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for
Speaker 1: some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: It was the morning of January thirteenth, twenty and eighteen.
Speaker 2: I was working on a fleet of boats out in Maui, Hawaii.
Speaker 2: I was the first meet of one of our fleets
Speaker 2: of vessels at Pacific Well Foundation. We would take people
Speaker 2: out on the water to go on well watching trips,
Speaker 2: snorkeling trips, dinner cruises, some set cruises.
Speaker 3: We like to do education on our boats to teach.
Speaker 2: About the whales and the islands, and I was on
Speaker 2: microphone when all of a sudden, this sound went off
Speaker 2: throughout the boat, coming out of everyone's cell phones all
Speaker 2: at once, kind of sounds like an amber alert. There
Speaker 2: was over a hundred of us on this relatively small boat,
Speaker 2: so it was quite startling. This woman from the back
Speaker 2: of the boat was holding her phone out in front
Speaker 2: of her and kind of like just staggering and clutching
Speaker 2: the chairs as she came down this walkway towards me.
Speaker 2: When she held the phone out and I got a
Speaker 2: chance to see it, I realized that the alert that
Speaker 2: everybody had gotten was a warning that there was a
Speaker 2: nuclear missile coming towards us.
Speaker 3: It was a beautiful day. The skies were clear and blue,
Speaker 3: the water was.
Speaker 2: Calm, and we were all about to die. I went
Speaker 2: and spoke to my captain a couple of quick googles.
Speaker 2: He was able to sort of piece together the amount
Speaker 2: of time. He said it would be less than twenty minutes.
Speaker 2: My job as the first mate is to be the
Speaker 2: person that communicates between the captain and the crew. So
Speaker 2: the captain makes orders and then I go and I
Speaker 2: delegate that out to the crew and decide who should
Speaker 2: be executing what task, and in what order those tasks
Speaker 2: should go. We quickly came up with the plan me
Speaker 2: and the captain of trying to take our vessel far
Speaker 2: away from.
Speaker 3: The wind coming from O Wacoo.
Speaker 2: We felt like a Wahoo would be the most likely
Speaker 2: target of a nuclear missile. We decided to just take
Speaker 2: our boat out to see far away from any fallout
Speaker 2: and hope for the best.
Speaker 3: But we also.
Speaker 2: Grabbed life jackets and made nervous people my ties and
Speaker 2: called our families and said goodbye, which was really really hard.
Speaker 2: You always hear the question what would you do if
Speaker 2: you had twenty minutes left to live? Everybody has such
Speaker 2: a different reaction to that situation. One of my friends
Speaker 2: was a photographer, and he happened to be in the
Speaker 2: harbor holding a really nice camera, and so he decided
Speaker 2: to set it up to record and built a little
Speaker 2: rock structure around it to capture any possible media he could.
Speaker 2: He pointed it towards Wahu and hoped that the camera
Speaker 2: wouldn't get destroyed. One of my friends cracked a bunch
Speaker 2: of bottles of champagne and put them on ice. Another
Speaker 2: one of my friends quite literally abandoned one of our
Speaker 2: multimillion dollar boats in the harbor. She thought it was
Speaker 2: ridiculous to be at work if she had fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: left to live, she wanted to be with her dog,
Speaker 2: and so she dropped the boat on land.
Speaker 3: And ran to her dog.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of tension between the United States
Speaker 2: and North Korea at the time. That made the threat
Speaker 2: of a nuclear missile attack much more believable. You know,
Speaker 2: when need to just think about geographically too. It would
Speaker 2: be most simple to aim a missile at the point
Speaker 2: of the US that's closest to North Korea.
Speaker 3: And that would be Hawaii.
Speaker 2: I think it was nineteen minutes until they told us
Speaker 2: that they had been running a drill that day and
Speaker 2: somebody mistook it for a real situation, and so they
Speaker 2: had triggered a very real alert. But it was after
Speaker 2: the missile would have impacted that we found out that
Speaker 2: it was a false alarm. That afternoon, when we came
Speaker 2: back to shore, our beautiful town Leahina was bustling with
Speaker 2: people who were joyous to have lived through something. The
Speaker 2: Lahina is nestled on one of the south facing shores
Speaker 2: of Mali, but it's kind of on the western edge.
Speaker 2: It used to be the home of the chiefs of Hawaii,
Speaker 2: so it was the heart of the Hawaiian Kingdom for
Speaker 2: a really really long period of time, and so it
Speaker 2: was kind of a crown jewel.
Speaker 3: It was a really really special place.
Speaker 2: There's this underlying richness to the culture there, even though
Speaker 2: today it presents like a very tourist town with cute
Speaker 2: galleries and experiences on the ocean and restaurants by the seat.
Speaker 3: People that I've.
Speaker 2: Come to know in Lehina are incredibly strong and prideful.
Speaker 3: In the best way.
Speaker 2: Had moved to an apartment that was right behind Fleetwood's,
Speaker 2: which is a bar that's famously owned by Mick Fleetwood
Speaker 2: of Fleetwood Mac. It was located right in the center
Speaker 2: of Lahaina town on Front Street.
Speaker 3: It was the core of the town. I had lived
Speaker 3: in this unit.
Speaker 2: That was affordable until it was sold to developers and
Speaker 2: they were going to turn it into vacation rentals, which you.
Speaker 3: Know, broke our heart.
Speaker 2: There's nowhere for the people who work there to live
Speaker 2: that can afford it. We were being priced out of paradise.
Speaker 2: So it was a very scary time for our unit.
Speaker 2: US residents banded together, did media interviews, talk to local
Speaker 2: politicians whatever we could. Ultimately, the county ended up buying
Speaker 2: the property back from the developers and kept it as
Speaker 2: housing for people that needed it. Because of the action
Speaker 2: taken by the residents of our unit. I lived with
Speaker 2: people who had a deep tie to Lahina and they
Speaker 2: weren't willing to leave. They weren't willing to walk out
Speaker 2: of that beautiful place. One of the people that I'm
Speaker 2: speaking most fondly of is my next door neighbor, Freeman
Speaker 2: Tim Lung. He was an older gentleman who was such
Speaker 2: a bright light of a person, and he was always
Speaker 2: excited and happy. One of my neighbors, Attina, would just
Speaker 2: take him out driving every week to show him Lahina
Speaker 2: because he had mobility issues and didn't have a car,
Speaker 2: and he was born and raised in Lahina Inna meant
Speaker 2: a lot to him. We won the right to stay
Speaker 2: in our building right as COVID began to hit the island,
Speaker 2: and that was a very devastating time for Mali. Because
Speaker 2: we rely heavily on tourism. My company laid off a
Speaker 2: lot of employees, as did many other organizations and the
Speaker 2: local population began to really feel the effects, and so
Speaker 2: coming out of that situation and rebuilding the community, seeing
Speaker 2: businesses open again, seeing tourism come back, was a huge weight.
Speaker 3: Lifted for many people.
Speaker 2: We had made it through his COVID hump, which was remarkable,
Speaker 2: and then the worst they hit our town. On August
Speaker 2: eighth of twenty twenty three. Early in the morning, I
Speaker 2: had woken up to realize that we had no power,
Speaker 2: self service was limited.
Speaker 3: The weather was stormy.
Speaker 2: It was incredibly windy, some of the strongest gusts of
Speaker 2: wind I had ever seen. I remember that morning actually
Speaker 2: taking a video outside of my window, thinking, you know, wow,
Speaker 2: the wind is never whistled like this, like it's making
Speaker 2: this sound. It's almost like there's somebody singing on the wind.
Speaker 2: It's so different sounding than any wind I've ever heard before.
Speaker 2: There had been a fire that morning up the mountain
Speaker 2: from us. Not very long after the fire began, they
Speaker 2: had posted one hundred percent contained, everything's fine. Stand down
Speaker 2: to all of the fire crews with up the mountain
Speaker 2: on the other side of the island to go fight
Speaker 2: a fire that was happening there. I was in my
Speaker 2: apartment at about three pm or so when I just
Speaker 2: kind of noticed the faintest smell of smoke in the air,
Speaker 2: just a little tiny hint of it. Freeman, my next
Speaker 2: door neighbor, was standing in his doorway as well.
Speaker 3: So I asked him.
Speaker 2: I was like, Freeman, do you smell something? And He's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: I don't smell anything. So I was like, Okay, maybe
Speaker 2: I'm just being a little oversensitive. A lot of us
Speaker 2: were used to them, like burning the sugar cane fields,
Speaker 2: and like the smell of just this burning that's kind
Speaker 2: of throughout the town constantly. So I went back inside.
Speaker 2: I took a really really quick shower, and then I
Speaker 2: was sitting inside and I heard something I couldn't even
Speaker 2: place what it was. It was just like the weirdest sound.
Speaker 2: The fact that I could hear anything over the wind
Speaker 2: was startling to me, and so I went outside and
Speaker 2: I realized that what I was hearing was the personal
Speaker 2: fire detectors from all of the houses on my street.
Speaker 2: This point, the sky was black, and we realized it
Speaker 2: was like a really really bad situation. We started to
Speaker 2: actually at that point really strategize about, like what does
Speaker 2: evacuation look like? And I remember my neighbor Steve almost
Speaker 2: jokingly being like, well, hey, at least we've always got
Speaker 2: an ocean.
Speaker 3: You can't burn in an ocean.
Speaker 2: Right, Embers started to fly over our heads and land
Speaker 2: on the buildings, and he was spraying the embers with
Speaker 2: a hose, you know, he would spray one in ten
Speaker 2: would fall, and then he would get another one, and
Speaker 2: a twenty would fall. And it was becoming this exponential
Speaker 2: problem where it's like, hey man, you can't put all
Speaker 2: of these out.
Speaker 3: There's no way.
Speaker 2: And we're also starting to lose time, and at this
Speaker 2: point his wife began to.
Speaker 3: Screen that they needed to go.
Speaker 2: I have a video where the sky would go hitch
Speaker 2: black and then it would open up for the split
Speaker 2: second as the wind would like rush through all the
Speaker 2: spoke was clear, and it would be like you'd realized
Speaker 2: it was daytime, and then it would just be nighttime again.
Speaker 2: As those embers started to burn, we made the call
Speaker 2: that we have to go. Freeman didn't want to leave,
Speaker 2: and we just kept telling him he had to.
Speaker 3: I was trying to get them both to come into
Speaker 3: my car.
Speaker 2: Freeman, for whatever reason, didn't want to get in, and
Speaker 2: Atina said that She wanted to take him down to
Speaker 2: Front Street by foot, which was concerning to me, but
Speaker 2: also there's so little time to fight people. In a
Speaker 2: moment like that, I saw the like walk away as
Speaker 2: like fires kind of like appeared between me and them,
Speaker 2: and at that point I lost sight of them. Behind
Speaker 2: that wall of fire, I began driving into the most
Speaker 2: pitch black I've ever seen. It's not driving through smoke,
Speaker 2: it's driving through a solid, opaque wall. I couldn't even
Speaker 2: see the hood of my own car. People were driving
Speaker 2: up onto the sidewalks, trying to get around parked cars
Speaker 2: or cars that were being hesitant to move forward. With
Speaker 2: winds that one hundred and twenty miles per hour, that
Speaker 2: fire moves at a rate I can't I don't even
Speaker 2: have words to express how pickly a fire was running
Speaker 2: towards you.
Speaker 3: It was monumental.
Speaker 2: At one point, a tourist named Naim popped into my
Speaker 2: car in a panic and he said, turn and go
Speaker 2: up the mountain.
Speaker 3: I had to tell him, like, that's where I just
Speaker 3: came from.
Speaker 2: The fire's coming from that direction, and he's like, well,
Speaker 2: I just came from down the road the other direction
Speaker 2: from us, and there's fire there too, and as I
Speaker 2: was like, I'm not going up the mountain, and so
Speaker 2: he got out of my car and he disappeared into
Speaker 2: the wall of s Hope. Fortunately, right about that time,
Speaker 2: I saw Freeman and Atina making it on foot to
Speaker 2: this exact same area, so I jumped out to talk
Speaker 2: quickly with Atina and Freeman. We assisted Freeman up and
Speaker 2: over this rock wall, which was challenging because of the
Speaker 2: dropped out on the other side. At this point, the
Speaker 2: wind was as extreme as it had been all night.
Speaker 2: It was whipping. You have this rain of fire that's
Speaker 2: just coming down on your body and burning you, and
Speaker 2: you can't avoid it with light.
Speaker 3: Your clothes on fire.
Speaker 2: And there was about one hundred people gathered on the coast.
Speaker 2: People's hair was catching no fire. There was multiple times
Speaker 2: I like shouted down to somebody, like you were on fire.
Speaker 2: Some people had already got into the ocean and begun
Speaker 2: drifting out to sea. I saw that there's people in
Speaker 2: the ocean, but I couldn't even see how far out
Speaker 2: people were going to. You just couldn't see that far.
Speaker 2: And you're looking through squintid eyes the whole time, and
Speaker 2: you're trying to blink constantly, cause your eyes are full
Speaker 2: of soot and ash.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 3: It was very hot.
Speaker 2: It's hard to describe, like the radiating heat that comes
Speaker 2: from an entire town burning down. The ground itself began
Speaker 2: to heat up like an oven, and we were sitting
Speaker 2: on old lava rocks. I was cooking, but I was
Speaker 2: very clear headed, and I thought more about, you know,
Speaker 2: what it would truly take to survive each moment and
Speaker 2: each woe, It being a small decision, not looking at
Speaker 2: the big picture, but like what do I do right now?
Speaker 2: It was concerned about the quality of the air, so
Speaker 2: you just can't breathe in this thick smoke. Additionally to
Speaker 2: the smoke, you have this rain of fire that's just
Speaker 2: coming down on your body constantly. I knew at that
Speaker 2: point that I was going to be out here for
Speaker 2: a long time. Before I left my house, I grabbed
Speaker 2: everything I could and shoved it into an Ikea bag,
Speaker 2: and I grabbed the most important thing, which was my
Speaker 2: pet burd After we got a Tina and Freeman over
Speaker 2: the wall, I went back to my car to get
Speaker 2: out of the smoke and the falling embers, as well
Speaker 2: as to spend some final moments with my bird, and
Speaker 2: I ultimately fed her what would be her vital meal.
Speaker 2: My bird was flightless, and so I knew the safest
Speaker 2: place for it would be in my car, and so
Speaker 2: I left it behind, closed the door and got into
Speaker 2: the ocean. The ember is falling on your skin, just burned,
Speaker 2: and so you know the coolness of the water with
Speaker 2: a little bit.
Speaker 3: Of a comfort.
Speaker 2: We didn't want to go too far out because there
Speaker 2: was sharks and currents, and it was nighttime. The waves
Speaker 2: are just pushing you around, and Freeman couldn't have kept
Speaker 2: himself up in the surf, and so he stayed on
Speaker 2: the rocks. The wind was pushing flaming debris all around us,
Speaker 2: while the ocean was being just whipped up by this
Speaker 2: intense wind, and all around you could just hear the
Speaker 2: scream of people panicked and confused. I heard screams of
Speaker 2: terror that were deep and real. Slowly, over the course
Speaker 2: of the next hour, so the building that was across
Speaker 2: the street from us became completely engulfed in flames. We
Speaker 2: tried not to watch, because it's traumatic to watch the
Speaker 2: things you love just disappear in front of you. The
Speaker 2: area that we had been in was a really, really cleat,
Speaker 2: little walking part of town. Throughout the course of the night,
Speaker 2: you know, the scenery changed on us dramatically. These buildings
Speaker 2: that were so beautiful, kind of historic, old timey looking buildings.
Speaker 3: You see them go up into flames, and then they.
Speaker 2: Would just sort of it's hard to describe the way
Speaker 2: that they would just kind of collapse in on themselves,
Speaker 2: like they gave a big sigh.
Speaker 3: And just sort of imploded. It was just so horrifying.
Speaker 2: And also, you know, it hurts your eyes the light
Speaker 2: and the smoke and everything, and we want to shield
Speaker 2: your face from the heat. We all got very badly
Speaker 2: burned on our faces from just the heat of everything happening,
Speaker 2: but also from our masks rubbing up against our noses.
Speaker 2: I would stop throughout the night and kind of peek
Speaker 2: my head over the rock wall and just sort of
Speaker 2: see how everything was progressing. And I just remember specifically
Speaker 2: the building that was across from us.
Speaker 3: It went through this.
Speaker 2: Evolution where the walls kind of burnt off of it,
Speaker 2: but you could see inside and the tables were still
Speaker 2: set as if they were going to do dinner service
Speaker 2: that night. And then you look away for another moment
Speaker 2: and look back and now the building's gone and it's
Speaker 2: just a one foot pile of rubble on the ground.
Speaker 2: The biggest threat that we were facing was the smoke.
Speaker 2: We were submerging ourselves in the shallowest of the water.
Speaker 2: We wanted to be close enough that we felt land
Speaker 2: underneath our feet, but we wanted to be far enough
Speaker 2: from the fire or that we could breathe, and we
Speaker 2: weren't getting hit with the embers as heavily in the water.
Speaker 2: Somewhere around seven PM, we began to hear explosions coming
Speaker 2: down the road towards us, one after the other after
Speaker 2: the other, and there was hundreds of them. We realized
Speaker 2: that it was the cars that were parked that were exploding.
Speaker 3: All throughout town. All these people had abandoned their cars.
Speaker 2: There's like a hundred of us, all of our vehicles
Speaker 2: parked behind our heads.
Speaker 3: The ground was beginning to shake with every single explosion.
Speaker 2: I was beginning to get very, very fearful, especially because
Speaker 2: now we're we're hiding behind this rock wall, and there's
Speaker 2: there's a car, you know, two feet on the other
Speaker 2: side of that rock wall from us, and the second
Speaker 2: that it explodes, are these rocks going to come tumbling
Speaker 2: down on us. The fumes that come off of a
Speaker 2: car explosion are noxious. We could not breathe. You would inhale,
Speaker 2: but there was no oxygen. I remember at one point
Speaker 2: looking over to A Tina because I realized like suddenly
Speaker 2: I wasn't I wasn't breathing, and I tried to say
Speaker 2: to her, I can't breathe, and I didn't.
Speaker 3: Have a voice.
Speaker 2: Finally, is able to kind of like whisper to her
Speaker 2: like I can't talk, and she said the same thing
Speaker 2: back to me.
Speaker 3: I heard it in her voice too.
Speaker 2: We kind of like gestured to each other like we
Speaker 2: should go towards Freeman, and we both stood up and
Speaker 2: we walked maybe five feet, and I've I've never felt
Speaker 2: such a level of like extreme exhaustion and oxygen deprivation,
Speaker 2: and like I'm a free diver. I lived in a
Speaker 2: world of oxygen deprivation. I was used to the thee
Speaker 2: of having a lot of carbon dioxide in your system,
Speaker 2: like that's actually something I had specifically trained for it.
Speaker 3: And I couldn't walk one more step.
Speaker 2: I walked about five feet and I quite literally collapsed
Speaker 2: on the ground. A Tina did as well, and I
Speaker 2: was like I can't get to him, and she said
Speaker 2: I can't either.
Speaker 3: We were in the surf.
Speaker 2: There was moments where we were holding each other's hands,
Speaker 2: and sometimes we would just squeeze each other's hands to
Speaker 2: let each other know that we were there because we
Speaker 2: would lose consciousness. I just remember kind of trying to
Speaker 2: like like whisper talk. Every once in a while. It
Speaker 2: was like, just keep breathing, stay awake. And there's times
Speaker 2: I saw her drifting away and I would pull her bag.
Speaker 2: And there's times I was dripped away and she pulled
Speaker 2: me back. It was close to dying, and in that
Speaker 2: moment everything got quiet. All of the explosions sounded like
Speaker 2: popping popcorn and it was just like pop pop pop,
Speaker 2: and it felt like I could just go to sleep
Speaker 2: and everything would just be okay. I had a vision
Speaker 2: of multiple bright, bright blue lights that were just dancing
Speaker 2: around my field of vision. I'm not a super religious person,
Speaker 2: but I just feel like I had loving arms around
Speaker 2: me that night. I think that's what I was seeing
Speaker 2: in that moment, like the souls of the people that
Speaker 2: were protecting me. I fell unconscious while I was belly
Speaker 2: down in the water, and my head would collapse and
Speaker 2: my lips would hit the surface of the water, and
Speaker 2: that feeling of water on my lips would jolt me
Speaker 2: back to alertness, and I would remember, like I have
Speaker 2: to keep breathing, Like if you put your head down,
Speaker 2: you're gonna drown.
Speaker 3: I'm so grateful to the ocean itself when there was
Speaker 3: a fire on three sides of us to be this
Speaker 3: like open.
Speaker 2: Arms of comfort, and for that moment of like, as
Speaker 2: I was quite literally losing my own life, it was
Speaker 2: going to be my reminder to keep breathing. The wind
Speaker 2: was still just bearing down on us the whole night,
Speaker 2: and it blew some of that, like those most horrible
Speaker 2: fumes away. Suddenly I could talk again. I looked at
Speaker 2: a teen and I was like, hey, we're here, and
Speaker 2: I remember her looking at me. She goes, you are shaking.
Speaker 2: I was extremely hypothermic from just laying motionless in the
Speaker 2: water for as long as I had been. I had
Speaker 2: to warm up my body, and so I actually ended
Speaker 2: up climbing back.
Speaker 3: Up over the rock wall and.
Speaker 2: Huddled down like near the the embers of Waikiki Brewery
Speaker 2: as it was like finished. She gets burned down to
Speaker 2: the ground just to get some warmth from the fire.
Speaker 2: I burned myself badly doing that, but but it was
Speaker 2: the only way to stay warm. Once I had regained
Speaker 2: my senses, I shouted to a teena that I wanted
Speaker 2: to check on Freeman. We both started making our way
Speaker 2: towards him, she on the rocks and me on the road.
Speaker 2: And I made it to him first, and I found
Speaker 2: that he had passed away, and there was just nothing
Speaker 2: I could do, and I had to resign myself to say, like,
Speaker 2: I can't.
Speaker 3: I can't do anything for him, it's too late.
Speaker 2: Back when we were fighting for the right to stay
Speaker 2: in Lahina as residents, Freeman had spoken to a news
Speaker 2: outlet and was quoted saying I was born in Lehina
Speaker 2: and I will die in Lahina. Lohina was so important
Speaker 2: to Freeman, and Freeman was so important to Leahina that
Speaker 2: I'm glad that Freeman never had to see Lahina gone.
Speaker 2: At about nine or nine thirty PM, and I was
Speaker 2: able to finally make a call out to the police
Speaker 2: and say that we needed to rescue. They were able
Speaker 2: to confirm that they knew we were there. Other people
Speaker 2: had called in already and said that we were there,
Speaker 2: but that they didn't honestly know how to rescue us
Speaker 2: at that moment. The situation was obviously a tough one.
Speaker 2: They couldn't get their rescue vehicles to where we were
Speaker 2: because of just all the debris in the road down lines,
Speaker 2: the town was still on fire. Everything was making it
Speaker 2: hard to rescue, and they didn't know when they could
Speaker 2: help us. I remember telling Atina, like, we don't need
Speaker 2: to eat tonight. It's okay, It'll be fine. We can
Speaker 2: survive this. We have the fire and embers to keep
Speaker 2: us warm. We have the ocean to keep us cool, like,
Speaker 2: we'll live through this.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Rescue didn't come for us until after midnight. Are all
Speaker 2: to bit Rescue was well later. We had quite a
Speaker 2: prolonged period of time just kind of waiting after the
Speaker 2: fire was out, which was a surreal experience. I began
Speaker 2: to sort of wander around the street and see some
Speaker 2: of the destruction, things like all of the rims of
Speaker 2: all the cars. The aluminum wheels were melted to the ground,
Speaker 2: and you would just see these streams of melted silver
Speaker 2: metal running through the streets.
Speaker 3: It was remarkably quiet.
Speaker 2: I think there was a lot of people around, but
Speaker 2: nobody was really talking to each other. We were all
Speaker 2: sort of just quietly taking it all in and moving
Speaker 2: around the scene, just kind of looking at all these
Speaker 2: things that suddenly looked so different than they had just
Speaker 2: a couple of hours earlier.
Speaker 3: There was fire on all sides.
Speaker 2: Since it was like a whole two blocks away, at
Speaker 2: that point, it felt much less threatening than it had
Speaker 2: all night, and I was like, oh, I'm safe to
Speaker 2: take a nap now, which is wild in retrospect. I
Speaker 2: laid down the sidewalk and I took about a ten
Speaker 2: minute nap, and then the fire trucks came back to
Speaker 2: rescue us. At that first shelter that I was at,
Speaker 2: there was a heavy focus on like figuring out the
Speaker 2: medical needs. My injuries that I sustained included mostly burns.
Speaker 2: I burned my rear end very badly from sitting on
Speaker 2: the rocks. I have very significant scarring on my legs.
Speaker 2: I have a lot of cuts from being bashed against
Speaker 2: the rocks all night. All of the scars on my
Speaker 2: left hand side of my body are much much worse
Speaker 2: than the right hand side because that's the side that
Speaker 2: the wind was coming at us from. I had ash
Speaker 2: coming out of my ears and my nose and my
Speaker 2: eyes everything for a remarkably long time. For the first
Speaker 2: few days, there was no cell phone signal over there,
Speaker 2: so nobody could contact family tell.
Speaker 3: Them that they were safe.
Speaker 2: We got to see some beautiful moments, like families reconnecting,
Speaker 2: the tears of parents finding their children out of shelter.
Speaker 2: There's no words, There are no words to describe the
Speaker 2: amount of love and emotion in that moment of reconnection.
Speaker 3: I saw that playing out multiple times.
Speaker 2: Daily, and also tragic loss boards of names getting bigger
Speaker 2: every day with all the people looking for their family.
Speaker 2: These events are escalating in quantity and severity over time, and.
Speaker 3: That's a factor of climate change.
Speaker 2: It's something that we've been told about since I was
Speaker 2: a child, that this was coming, this was the real threat.
Speaker 2: I remember as a child being told that, you know,
Speaker 2: in fifteen, in twenty years, we're going to start seeing
Speaker 2: these effects, and like surprise, everybody, we're here.
Speaker 3: It's that time. And the storms will continue to get worse.
Speaker 2: The wind will blow more, there will be more dry grass,
Speaker 2: there will be more lightning, there will be more things
Speaker 2: that will cause disasters, whether that's fire or not. But
Speaker 2: fire is going to be a big threat coming into
Speaker 2: all of our futures. It's too late for us to
Speaker 2: begin the small version of recovery from this. The only
Speaker 2: way that I personally see us protecting ourselves from this
Speaker 2: happening to everybody everywhere, all the time is starting on
Speaker 2: really large scale changes immediately, and that means governments and
Speaker 2: large corporations taking some accountability around what's happening with our climate.
Speaker 2: You have a warning now this can be your town too.
Speaker 2: We hear about fires everywhere Texas, California, Canada, like everywhere
Speaker 2: there's fires. Nobody deserves to live through what the people
Speaker 2: of Lahina have lived through, and nobody deserves to lose
Speaker 2: what everyone there has lost. I find a lot of
Speaker 2: hope still following this fire, but it's kind of a
Speaker 2: yin and yang experience for me. I will say I
Speaker 2: have a lot of hope in being alive. I'm grateful
Speaker 2: for an opportunity to continue my journey. I didn't think
Speaker 2: I was going to have that chance, and I had
Speaker 2: resigned myself to that. To have a second shot at things.
Speaker 3: Brings a level of clarity to your life.
Speaker 2: I'm hopeful that for me personally, you know there will
Speaker 2: still be a brighter tomorrow. Unfortunately that's still tomorrow. I'm
Speaker 2: still getting through it.
Speaker 1: Welcome back. This is a Live again joining me for
Speaker 1: a conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story.
Speaker 1: Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Dye, and I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 5: One thing that really struck me about this story from
Speaker 5: start to finish is her level of storytelling detail in
Speaker 5: every single one of these incidents. And I'm wondering if
Speaker 5: that's something that struck you as you were talking with her.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what a great storyteller. And the love that she
Speaker 6: had for Lahina. You know this her love for the
Speaker 6: place of Freeman's love for the place.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: It was a heartbreaking story.
Speaker 1: And she talked about at the end there I hear
Speaker 1: her telling stories about people reuniting and having these precious
Speaker 1: moments of reconnecting and finding their loved ones, and all
Speaker 1: the tragedy of those who didn't and will never does
Speaker 1: she talk about did she talk about people's hope or resilience? Like,
Speaker 1: did she talk much about that?
Speaker 6: I don't think there was time for her to have hope.
Speaker 6: I think it was such a constant mirage of horror
Speaker 6: that they were surviving minute to minute.
Speaker 1: I think I told you guys once. I was on
Speaker 1: a documentary assignment in the island of Samata in Indonesia
Speaker 1: after the tsunami hit, and it hit in Christmas two
Speaker 1: thousand and four, so I was there shortly like in
Speaker 1: February two thousand and five, and there were mass graves,
Speaker 1: you know, from this horrific tsudami event, and I witnessed those,
Speaker 1: and I witnessed towns that had had eighty percent of
Speaker 1: their persons wiped out, so you got twenty percent of
Speaker 1: the town left and just complete devastation. And in these
Speaker 1: Indonesian people, I saw still the capacity to smile and
Speaker 1: laugh and comfort each other. And it just struck me,
Speaker 1: I'll never be the same. I couldn't understand how you
Speaker 1: could have lost your eighty percent of your village, you know,
Speaker 1: and had your entire village wiped out. The only thing
Speaker 1: still standing was the mosques because they were open air,
Speaker 1: so the water could move through them freely without knocking
Speaker 1: them over. But they could. They still had this sense
Speaker 1: of laughter, and they were still living. They still had life,
Speaker 1: she said.
Speaker 6: One of the benefits of it being in Hawaii as
Speaker 6: there was this great Hawaiian music. People would be playing
Speaker 6: guitars and singing songs, and so there was a lot
Speaker 6: of life in that recovery period for her, for sure.
Speaker 6: But then she's lost her livelihood. She's had to move
Speaker 6: back to Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: Another part of the story was they went through COVID
Speaker 6: and were out of work for two years and their
Speaker 6: community was finally coming back together when this hit and
Speaker 6: just kind of destroyed it. And she also talked about
Speaker 6: how much she loved the sea and wanted to be
Speaker 6: out there by the ocean, and it's been taken away
Speaker 6: from her.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this is I think probably going to be
Speaker 1: one of many horrific cautionary tales that we're gonna continue
Speaker 1: to hear about, and that.
Speaker 5: Sort of the theme running throughout about humanity's ability to
Speaker 5: just really f things up. I mean, because you hear
Speaker 5: the first story that she tells about the nuclear test.
Speaker 3: I remember that.
Speaker 5: I remember hearing about that, and it's just so awful.
Speaker 5: You know, she has the image of the woman stumbling
Speaker 5: toward her on the boat, just everybody believing they have
Speaker 5: less than twenty minutes to live, making everybody my ties
Speaker 5: and like everybody's calling their families, and then you know
Speaker 5: they head for home, and then you hear we're going
Speaker 5: back to bustling Leahina, And somewhere in the back of
Speaker 5: my head, I thought, oh no, because you know, as
Speaker 5: a listener, what's coming next, if you're familiar with these stories.
Speaker 6: Current events, Well, just that whole surreal opening to her
Speaker 6: story being out there on the whale watching expedition when
Speaker 6: they get this text that nuclear annihilation is coming your way.
Speaker 6: You have twenty minutes, and their thought was, well, maybe
Speaker 6: we can boat out of the fall zone. And I'm like,
Speaker 6: there is no And I just think that's a threat
Speaker 6: that we kind of forgotten about. But it's very real.
Speaker 6: You know, nuclear proliferation and annihilation is never went away
Speaker 6: as a worldwide threat.
Speaker 1: You know, it's worse.
Speaker 6: It's godden worse.
Speaker 5: And you know, like as somebody else said in her story, like,
Speaker 5: and I think about this a lot. I'm sure a
Speaker 5: lot of us do in this room as writers, as
Speaker 5: we experience the world through our five senses, right, Like
Speaker 5: that's and so that's the way we convey our world
Speaker 5: to others.
Speaker 3: And God, I mean in so many places she does that.
Speaker 3: She talks about how.
Speaker 5: She was watching the evolution of the building falling down,
Speaker 5: and first the wall disappears and you could see the
Speaker 5: interior and these sort of perfectly set tables and then
Speaker 5: you look up again and it's sort of twisted metal. Anyway,
Speaker 5: It's it's these it's these details, these sensory details of
Speaker 5: the heat, all of it that makes the.
Speaker 6: Story so affecting, Like sitting this side of my face
Speaker 6: was burned because that's where the wind was coming from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the sounds of the exploding cars getting closer
Speaker 1: and closer. It's just she she captured these sort of
Speaker 1: in between moments were the last still living thing is
Speaker 1: still being there live and you're watching it burn.
Speaker 5: Right right, And you know, if she wasn't sort of
Speaker 5: I guess I, you know, straight up convert about climate
Speaker 5: change and it sounds like she, you know, was aware
Speaker 5: of that and before, but you know, of course she
Speaker 5: is now. And it just sort of made made me
Speaker 5: think about how hearing stories like hers, or experiencing this
Speaker 5: oneself is the only way, it's the only thing that's
Speaker 5: really going to change people.
Speaker 6: I just don't know why it has to be something
Speaker 6: you experience firsthand to understand the threat of it, and
Speaker 6: I and and my reaction to hearing about it, even
Speaker 6: before I spoke with Analyse, was when I heard about
Speaker 6: what happened in the Heina, I thought, if a foreign
Speaker 6: nation had done this to us, we would go to
Speaker 6: war with them immediately. But we're not going to war
Speaker 6: against climate change.
Speaker 7: I mean, I mean it's because we it's because we
Speaker 7: live in this like corporate hellscape, and it's less about
Speaker 7: fixing things for humanity and more about like increasing profit margins.
Speaker 7: And it's just like for the oil companies, it's just
Speaker 7: it's just cheaper to keep you know, pumping oil out
Speaker 7: of the earth, burning it and like raising the cost
Speaker 7: of gas, you know, and then spending a chunk of
Speaker 7: your profits on lobbying, you know, Congress.
Speaker 1: I think about the biodiversity that's already been lost. We're
Speaker 1: in the middle of a mass extinction right now that
Speaker 1: nobody wants to talk about. And I think about that.
Speaker 1: And it's not just the loss of you know, an
Speaker 1: accelerated number of species per year, like one hundredfold, but
Speaker 1: those species like we're just now starting to understand, you know,
Speaker 1: genetics and DNA and the information there. There's so much
Speaker 1: adaptive information from millions and millions and years of adaptation
Speaker 1: in each one of these species, in each one of
Speaker 1: these creatures.
Speaker 6: Yeah, everything else a library that's taken millions of years
Speaker 6: to write each book, Each piece of DNA has taken
Speaker 6: hundreds of millions of years to re and we're destroying it.
Speaker 1: She's just there's this resilience that humans are capable of,
Speaker 1: and you know, anytime I come across it, it's inspiring.
Speaker 1: So people who otherwise maybe didn't know they had it
Speaker 1: in them, and then all of a sudden they do,
Speaker 1: and it gives me some hope.
Speaker 7: For sure. There's nothing more sobering than the consequences of
Speaker 7: our actions.
Speaker 3: That's like.
Speaker 1: Next time on Alive Again, we hear the story of
Speaker 1: Kathy Preston, a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Nazis and hungry.
Speaker 1: She lived to become an educator, telling her truth to
Speaker 1: thousands of children in the hopes that they move forward
Speaker 1: and vigilance and kindness.
Speaker 4: And they kept coming closer and closer, and they were
Speaker 4: using their bayonets to rifle through the hay and stab
Speaker 4: the hay. They got closer and closer, and then I
Speaker 4: hear a thump, and I open an eye and there's
Speaker 4: a big black boot next to my face and the
Speaker 4: bayonet comes down one inch from this cheek, and.
Speaker 3: Then he pulls it out.
Speaker 4: I still remember the noise it made as it came
Speaker 4: out of the wood, and I think that's when I
Speaker 4: realized what it means to die. I'm not a victim.
Speaker 4: I'm a survivor, and I'm going to fight for this
Speaker 4: until I stopped talking, because I don't believe that we
Speaker 4: have to give up to evil. The only way we
Speaker 4: can fight it is to resist it.
Speaker 1: Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brentdye, Nicholas Dakoski,
Speaker 1: and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovin, additional music by
Speaker 1: Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our
Speaker 1: studio engineers are Rima Elkali and Nams Griffin. Our editors
Speaker 1: are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slovitchca, Brit Dye, and Alexander Rodriguez.
Speaker 1: Mixing by Ben Lovet and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Dan Bush. Thanks to Analie Cochran for sharing her story.
Speaker 1: Alive Again is a production of iHeartRadio and Psychopia Pictures.
Speaker 1: If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at
Speaker 1: Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l
Speaker 1: i v e A g A I N P R
Speaker 1: O j e C T at gmail dot com.