The miraculous survival of a ski instructor, Mr Stuart Diver, trapped for three days in the flooded and frozen rubble of a landslide here, spurred rescuers at the weekend in their race to find others alive. Searchers said finding Mr Diver had boosted their morale tremendously, but dampening the euphoria was the rising death toll, which yesterday was nine.
"This man's chances of survival were one in a million," said a trauma specialist, Mr Richard Morris, who crawled down into the debris to treat him. "He obviously has incredible strength of spirit."
Mr Diver, who emerged virtually unscathed from the rubble, was well enough for a brief media interview yesterday. He thanked his rescuers and everyone who prayed for him.
The 27-year-old resident of Thredbo, a New South Wales ski resort, narrowly missed being crushed and drowned in the early hours of Wednesday when a landslip sent a wooden lodge crashing onto the one where he slept next to his wife, Sally. He was trapped between two concrete slabs in a tiny cavity that rapidly flooded with water gushing from a mountain spring believed responsible for the disaster. As the icy water lapped at his upper lip, he had to push his nose up against the concrete to snatch breaths of air until the water drained away. "A number of times he could hear the rush of water starting to build up behind him and he just knew that he was going to get hit with water again," Mr Paul Featherstone, the paramedic who spent 11 hours underground with Mr Diver, said yesterday.
"He only had an inch or two inches above his nose and what he would do is he would lift his head and put it against the slab above his head and suck in the air," Mr Featherstone said.
Mr Diver's "mini-tomb" created by two concrete slabs allowed him only 12 inches in which to move his head and 15 to 19 inches to move his feet.
"This guy was never going to give up," the fire rescue commander, Mr Rob Killham, told reporters. Mr Killham told the Sun-Herald newspaper that Mr Diver knew his wife had been pinned to the mattress, and had drowned in the same torrent that nearly claimed his life.
With more than 40 per cent of the rubble that teetered precariously on the disaster site still untouched, rescuers were not discounting the possibility of another miracle rescue. Others were sceptical.
"In my mind, the fact that we found Stuart alive is an absolute miracle and the chance of finding other survivors is pretty small," said one.
Officials yesterday defended the methodical pace of the rescue operation. "One of the reasons that (Diver) has survived is because we have been so careful in removing all the debris. Further slips would have closed that very small gap he had to survive in," Mr Morris said.
An American couple and a New Zealand woman were among the 20 people - 12 men and eight women - caught in the disaster.