May 13, 2025 • 41 mins
First, they prepared for a missile. Years later, it was fire that came.
Annelise Cochran was working aboard a whale research vessel off the coast of Lahaina, Hawaii, when the state's missile alert system issued a terrifying false warning: a ballistic missile from North Korea was inbound. Everyone on board braced for the end. It didn’t come—but in many ways, it was a dark premonition.
Five years later, Annelise found herself facing a real catastrophe. As wildfires swept through Lahaina with brutal speed, she and her friends fought for survival over eight harrowing hours. One of them didn’t make it.
This episode is a haunting and deeply human story of foresight, loss, and the raw resilience it takes to face a world unraveling. It’s a powerful reminder of how community, resourcefulness, and inner strength can anchor us through the chaos of disaster.
Story producer: Brent Dey.
Other Resources:
Warning: This series contains graphic descriptions of trauma, violence, abuse, and other content that may not be suitable for certain listeners.
* If you have a transformative experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
You always hear the question what would you do if
you had twenty minutes left to live? I found out twice.
My name is Anily's Cochran. I survived a nuclear threat
and a climate disaster, and this is my story.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to
(01:03):
remind us all of our shared human condition. Please keep
in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for
some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It was the morning of January thirteenth, twenty and eighteen.
I was working on a fleet of boats out in Maui, Hawaii.
I was the first meet of one of our fleets
of vessels at Pacific Well Foundation. We would take people
(01:39):
out on the water to go on well watching trips,
snorkeling trips, dinner cruises, some set cruises.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
We like to do education on our boats to teach.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
About the whales and the islands, and I was on
microphone when all of a sudden, this sound went off
throughout the boat, coming out of everyone's cell phones all
at once, kind of sounds like an amber alert. There
was over a hundred of us on this relatively small boat,
(02:10):
so it was quite startling. This woman from the back
of the boat was holding her phone out in front
of her and kind of like just staggering and clutching
the chairs as she came down this walkway towards me.
When she held the phone out and I got a
chance to see it, I realized that the alert that
(02:31):
everybody had gotten was a warning that there was a
nuclear missile coming towards us.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It was a beautiful day. The skies were clear and blue,
the water was.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Calm, and we were all about to die. I went
and spoke to my captain a couple of quick googles.
He was able to sort of piece together the amount
of time. He said it would be less than twenty minutes.
My job as the first mate is to be the
person that communicates between the captain and the crew. So
(03:05):
the captain makes orders and then I go and I
delegate that out to the crew and decide who should
be executing what task, and in what order those tasks
should go. We quickly came up with the plan me
and the captain of trying to take our vessel far
away from.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
The wind coming from O Wacoo.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
We felt like a Wahoo would be the most likely
target of a nuclear missile. We decided to just take
our boat out to see far away from any fallout
and hope for the best.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
But we also.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Grabbed life jackets and made nervous people my ties and
called our families and said goodbye, which was really really hard.
You always hear the question what would you do if
you had twenty minutes left to live? Everybody has such
(04:01):
a different reaction to that situation. One of my friends
was a photographer, and he happened to be in the
harbor holding a really nice camera, and so he decided
to set it up to record and built a little
rock structure around it to capture any possible media he could.
He pointed it towards Wahu and hoped that the camera
(04:24):
wouldn't get destroyed. One of my friends cracked a bunch
of bottles of champagne and put them on ice. Another
one of my friends quite literally abandoned one of our
multimillion dollar boats in the harbor. She thought it was
ridiculous to be at work if she had fifteen minutes
left to live, she wanted to be with her dog,
and so she dropped the boat on land.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
And ran to her dog.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
There was a lot of tension between the United States
and North Korea at the time. That made the threat
of a nuclear missile attack much more believable. You know,
when need to just think about geographically too. It would
be most simple to aim a missile at the point
of the US that's closest to North Korea.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
And that would be Hawaii.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I think it was nineteen minutes until they told us
that they had been running a drill that day and
somebody mistook it for a real situation, and so they
had triggered a very real alert. But it was after
the missile would have impacted that we found out that
it was a false alarm. That afternoon, when we came
(05:38):
back to shore, our beautiful town Leahina was bustling with
people who were joyous to have lived through something. The
Lahina is nestled on one of the south facing shores
of Mali, but it's kind of on the western edge.
(05:59):
It used to be the home of the chiefs of Hawaii,
so it was the heart of the Hawaiian Kingdom for
a really really long period of time, and so it
was kind of a crown jewel.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
It was a really really special place.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
There's this underlying richness to the culture there, even though
today it presents like a very tourist town with cute
galleries and experiences on the ocean and restaurants by the seat.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
People that I've.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Come to know in Lehina are incredibly strong and prideful.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
In the best way.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Had moved to an apartment that was right behind Fleetwood's,
which is a bar that's famously owned by Mick Fleetwood
of Fleetwood Mac. It was located right in the center
of Lahaina town on Front Street.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
It was the core of the town. I had lived
in this unit.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That was affordable until it was sold to developers and
they were going to turn it into vacation rentals, which you.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Know, broke our heart.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
There's nowhere for the people who work there to live
that can afford it. We were being priced out of paradise.
So it was a very scary time for our unit.
US residents banded together, did media interviews, talk to local
politicians whatever we could. Ultimately, the county ended up buying
the property back from the developers and kept it as
(07:26):
housing for people that needed it. Because of the action
taken by the residents of our unit. I lived with
people who had a deep tie to Lahina and they
weren't willing to leave. They weren't willing to walk out
of that beautiful place. One of the people that I'm
speaking most fondly of is my next door neighbor, Freeman
(07:48):
Tim Lung. He was an older gentleman who was such
a bright light of a person, and he was always
excited and happy. One of my neighbors, Attina, would just
take him out driving every week to show him Lahina
because he had mobility issues and didn't have a car,
and he was born and raised in Lahina Inna meant
(08:09):
a lot to him. We won the right to stay
in our building right as COVID began to hit the island,
and that was a very devastating time for Mali. Because
we rely heavily on tourism. My company laid off a
lot of employees, as did many other organizations and the
local population began to really feel the effects, and so
(08:34):
coming out of that situation and rebuilding the community, seeing
businesses open again, seeing tourism come back, was a huge weight.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Lifted for many people.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
We had made it through his COVID hump, which was remarkable,
and then the worst they hit our town. On August
eighth of twenty twenty three. Early in the morning, I
had woken up to realize that we had no power,
(09:08):
self service was limited.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
The weather was stormy.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
It was incredibly windy, some of the strongest gusts of
wind I had ever seen. I remember that morning actually
taking a video outside of my window, thinking, you know, wow,
the wind is never whistled like this, like it's making
this sound. It's almost like there's somebody singing on the wind.
(09:37):
It's so different sounding than any wind I've ever heard before.
There had been a fire that morning up the mountain
from us. Not very long after the fire began, they
had posted one hundred percent contained, everything's fine. Stand down
(10:00):
to all of the fire crews with up the mountain
on the other side of the island to go fight
a fire that was happening there. I was in my
apartment at about three pm or so when I just
kind of noticed the faintest smell of smoke in the air,
just a little tiny hint of it. Freeman, my next
(10:23):
door neighbor, was standing in his doorway as well.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
So I asked him.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
I was like, Freeman, do you smell something? And He's like, no, no, no,
I don't smell anything. So I was like, Okay, maybe
I'm just being a little oversensitive. A lot of us
were used to them, like burning the sugar cane fields,
and like the smell of just this burning that's kind
of throughout the town constantly. So I went back inside.
(10:49):
I took a really really quick shower, and then I
was sitting inside and I heard something I couldn't even
place what it was. It was just like the weirdest sound.
The fact that I could hear anything over the wind
was startling to me, and so I went outside and
(11:10):
I realized that what I was hearing was the personal
fire detectors from all of the houses on my street.
This point, the sky was black, and we realized it
was like a really really bad situation. We started to
(11:35):
actually at that point really strategize about, like what does
evacuation look like? And I remember my neighbor Steve almost
jokingly being like, well, hey, at least we've always got
an ocean.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
You can't burn in an ocean.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Right, Embers started to fly over our heads and land
on the buildings, and he was spraying the embers with
a hose, you know, he would spray one in ten
would fall, and then he would get another one, and
a twenty would fall. And it was becoming this exponential
problem where it's like, hey man, you can't put all
of these out.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
There's no way.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
And we're also starting to lose time, and at this
point his wife began to.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Screen that they needed to go.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I have a video where the sky would go hitch
black and then it would open up for the split
second as the wind would like rush through all the
spoke was clear, and it would be like you'd realized
it was daytime, and then it would just be nighttime again.
As those embers started to burn, we made the call
that we have to go. Freeman didn't want to leave,
(12:38):
and we just kept telling him he had to.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I was trying to get them both to come into
my car.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Freeman, for whatever reason, didn't want to get in, and
Atina said that She wanted to take him down to
Front Street by foot, which was concerning to me, but
also there's so little time to fight people. In a
moment like that, I saw the like walk away as
like fires kind of like appeared between me and them,
and at that point I lost sight of them. Behind
(13:09):
that wall of fire, I began driving into the most
pitch black I've ever seen. It's not driving through smoke,
it's driving through a solid, opaque wall. I couldn't even
(13:30):
see the hood of my own car. People were driving
up onto the sidewalks, trying to get around parked cars
or cars that were being hesitant to move forward. With
winds that one hundred and twenty miles per hour, that
fire moves at a rate I can't I don't even
have words to express how pickly a fire was running
(13:51):
towards you.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
It was monumental.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
At one point, a tourist named Naim popped into my
car in a panic and he said, turn and go
up the mountain.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I had to tell him, like, that's where I just
came from.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
The fire's coming from that direction, and he's like, well,
I just came from down the road the other direction
from us, and there's fire there too, and as I
was like, I'm not going up the mountain, and so
he got out of my car and he disappeared into
the wall of s Hope. Fortunately, right about that time,
I saw Freeman and Atina making it on foot to
(14:37):
this exact same area, so I jumped out to talk
quickly with Atina and Freeman. We assisted Freeman up and
over this rock wall, which was challenging because of the
dropped out on the other side. At this point, the
wind was as extreme as it had been all night.
It was whipping. You have this rain of fire that's
(15:03):
just coming down on your body and burning you, and
you can't avoid it with light.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Your clothes on fire.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
And there was about one hundred people gathered on the coast.
People's hair was catching no fire. There was multiple times
I like shouted down to somebody, like you were on fire.
Some people had already got into the ocean and begun
drifting out to sea. I saw that there's people in
the ocean, but I couldn't even see how far out
people were going to. You just couldn't see that far.
And you're looking through squintid eyes the whole time, and
(15:30):
you're trying to blink constantly, cause your eyes are full
of soot and ash.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
And.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
It was very hot.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
It's hard to describe, like the radiating heat that comes
from an entire town burning down. The ground itself began
to heat up like an oven, and we were sitting
on old lava rocks. I was cooking, but I was
very clear headed, and I thought more about, you know,
(16:04):
what it would truly take to survive each moment and
each woe, It being a small decision, not looking at
the big picture, but like what do I do right now?
It was concerned about the quality of the air, so
you just can't breathe in this thick smoke. Additionally to
the smoke, you have this rain of fire that's just
coming down on your body constantly. I knew at that
(16:32):
point that I was going to be out here for
a long time. Before I left my house, I grabbed
everything I could and shoved it into an Ikea bag,
and I grabbed the most important thing, which was my
pet burd After we got a Tina and Freeman over
the wall, I went back to my car to get
out of the smoke and the falling embers, as well
(16:54):
as to spend some final moments with my bird, and
I ultimately fed her what would be her vital meal.
My bird was flightless, and so I knew the safest
place for it would be in my car, and so
I left it behind, closed the door and got into
the ocean. The ember is falling on your skin, just burned,
(17:22):
and so you know the coolness of the water with
a little bit.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Of a comfort.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
We didn't want to go too far out because there
was sharks and currents, and it was nighttime. The waves
are just pushing you around, and Freeman couldn't have kept
himself up in the surf, and so he stayed on
the rocks. The wind was pushing flaming debris all around us,
(17:50):
while the ocean was being just whipped up by this
intense wind, and all around you could just hear the
scream of people panicked and confused. I heard screams of
terror that were deep and real. Slowly, over the course
of the next hour, so the building that was across
(18:13):
the street from us became completely engulfed in flames. We
tried not to watch, because it's traumatic to watch the
things you love just disappear in front of you. The
area that we had been in was a really, really cleat,
little walking part of town. Throughout the course of the night,
you know, the scenery changed on us dramatically. These buildings
(18:38):
that were so beautiful, kind of historic, old timey looking buildings.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
You see them go up into flames, and then they.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Would just sort of it's hard to describe the way
that they would just kind of collapse in on themselves,
like they gave a big sigh.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
And just sort of imploded. It was just so horrifying.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
And also, you know, it hurts your eyes the light
and the smoke and everything, and we want to shield
your face from the heat. We all got very badly
burned on our faces from just the heat of everything happening,
but also from our masks rubbing up against our noses.
I would stop throughout the night and kind of peek
my head over the rock wall and just sort of
(19:21):
see how everything was progressing. And I just remember specifically
the building that was across from us.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
It went through this.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Evolution where the walls kind of burnt off of it,
but you could see inside and the tables were still
set as if they were going to do dinner service
that night. And then you look away for another moment
and look back and now the building's gone and it's
just a one foot pile of rubble on the ground.
The biggest threat that we were facing was the smoke.
(19:49):
We were submerging ourselves in the shallowest of the water.
We wanted to be close enough that we felt land
underneath our feet, but we wanted to be far enough
from the fire or that we could breathe, and we
weren't getting hit with the embers as heavily in the water.
Somewhere around seven PM, we began to hear explosions coming
(20:16):
down the road towards us, one after the other after
the other, and there was hundreds of them. We realized
that it was the cars that were parked that were exploding.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
All throughout town. All these people had abandoned their cars.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
There's like a hundred of us, all of our vehicles
parked behind our heads.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
The ground was beginning to shake with every single explosion.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I was beginning to get very, very fearful, especially because
now we're we're hiding behind this rock wall, and there's
there's a car, you know, two feet on the other
side of that rock wall from us, and the second
that it explodes, are these rocks going to come tumbling
down on us. The fumes that come off of a
car explosion are noxious. We could not breathe. You would inhale,
(21:10):
but there was no oxygen. I remember at one point
looking over to A Tina because I realized like suddenly
I wasn't I wasn't breathing, and I tried to say
to her, I can't breathe, and I didn't.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Have a voice.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Finally, is able to kind of like whisper to her
like I can't talk, and she said the same thing
back to me.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
I heard it in her voice too.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
We kind of like gestured to each other like we
should go towards Freeman, and we both stood up and
we walked maybe five feet, and I've I've never felt
such a level of like extreme exhaustion and oxygen deprivation,
and like I'm a free diver. I lived in a
(21:56):
world of oxygen deprivation. I was used to the thee
of having a lot of carbon dioxide in your system,
like that's actually something I had specifically trained for it.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
And I couldn't walk one more step.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
I walked about five feet and I quite literally collapsed
on the ground. A Tina did as well, and I
was like I can't get to him, and she said
I can't either.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
We were in the surf.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
There was moments where we were holding each other's hands,
and sometimes we would just squeeze each other's hands to
let each other know that we were there because we
would lose consciousness. I just remember kind of trying to
like like whisper talk. Every once in a while. It
was like, just keep breathing, stay awake. And there's times
I saw her drifting away and I would pull her bag.
(22:43):
And there's times I was dripped away and she pulled
me back. It was close to dying, and in that
moment everything got quiet. All of the explosions sounded like
popping popcorn and it was just like pop pop pop,
and it felt like I could just go to sleep
(23:08):
and everything would just be okay. I had a vision
of multiple bright, bright blue lights that were just dancing
around my field of vision. I'm not a super religious person,
(23:29):
but I just feel like I had loving arms around
me that night. I think that's what I was seeing
in that moment, like the souls of the people that
were protecting me. I fell unconscious while I was belly
down in the water, and my head would collapse and
my lips would hit the surface of the water, and
(23:50):
that feeling of water on my lips would jolt me
back to alertness, and I would remember, like I have
to keep breathing, Like if you put your head down,
you're gonna drown.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
I'm so grateful to the ocean itself when there was
a fire on three sides of us to be this
like open.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Arms of comfort, and for that moment of like, as
I was quite literally losing my own life, it was
going to be my reminder to keep breathing. The wind
was still just bearing down on us the whole night,
and it blew some of that, like those most horrible
fumes away. Suddenly I could talk again. I looked at
(24:31):
a teen and I was like, hey, we're here, and
I remember her looking at me. She goes, you are shaking.
I was extremely hypothermic from just laying motionless in the
water for as long as I had been. I had
to warm up my body, and so I actually ended
up climbing back.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Up over the rock wall and.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Huddled down like near the the embers of Waikiki Brewery
as it was like finished. She gets burned down to
the ground just to get some warmth from the fire.
I burned myself badly doing that, but but it was
the only way to stay warm. Once I had regained
(25:15):
my senses, I shouted to a teena that I wanted
to check on Freeman. We both started making our way
towards him, she on the rocks and me on the road.
And I made it to him first, and I found
that he had passed away, and there was just nothing
I could do, and I had to resign myself to say, like,
(25:36):
I can't.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I can't do anything for him, it's too late.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Back when we were fighting for the right to stay
in Lahina as residents, Freeman had spoken to a news
outlet and was quoted saying I was born in Lehina
and I will die in Lahina. Lohina was so important
to Freeman, and Freeman was so important to Leahina that
I'm glad that Freeman never had to see Lahina gone.
(26:09):
At about nine or nine thirty PM, and I was
able to finally make a call out to the police
and say that we needed to rescue. They were able
to confirm that they knew we were there. Other people
had called in already and said that we were there,
but that they didn't honestly know how to rescue us
at that moment. The situation was obviously a tough one.
(26:31):
They couldn't get their rescue vehicles to where we were
because of just all the debris in the road down lines,
the town was still on fire. Everything was making it
hard to rescue, and they didn't know when they could
help us. I remember telling Atina, like, we don't need
to eat tonight. It's okay, It'll be fine. We can
survive this. We have the fire and embers to keep
(26:51):
us warm. We have the ocean to keep us cool, like,
we'll live through this.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Rescue didn't come for us until after midnight. Are all
to bit Rescue was well later. We had quite a
prolonged period of time just kind of waiting after the
fire was out, which was a surreal experience. I began
to sort of wander around the street and see some
of the destruction, things like all of the rims of
(27:18):
all the cars. The aluminum wheels were melted to the ground,
and you would just see these streams of melted silver
metal running through the streets.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
It was remarkably quiet.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
I think there was a lot of people around, but
nobody was really talking to each other. We were all
sort of just quietly taking it all in and moving
around the scene, just kind of looking at all these
things that suddenly looked so different than they had just
a couple of hours earlier.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
There was fire on all sides.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Since it was like a whole two blocks away, at
that point, it felt much less threatening than it had
all night, and I was like, oh, I'm safe to
take a nap now, which is wild in retrospect. I
laid down the sidewalk and I took about a ten
minute nap, and then the fire trucks came back to
rescue us. At that first shelter that I was at,
(28:13):
there was a heavy focus on like figuring out the
medical needs. My injuries that I sustained included mostly burns.
I burned my rear end very badly from sitting on
the rocks. I have very significant scarring on my legs.
I have a lot of cuts from being bashed against
the rocks all night. All of the scars on my
left hand side of my body are much much worse
(28:36):
than the right hand side because that's the side that
the wind was coming at us from. I had ash
coming out of my ears and my nose and my
eyes everything for a remarkably long time. For the first
few days, there was no cell phone signal over there,
so nobody could contact family tell.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Them that they were safe.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
We got to see some beautiful moments, like families reconnecting,
the tears of parents finding their children out of shelter.
There's no words, There are no words to describe the
amount of love and emotion in that moment of reconnection.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
I saw that playing out multiple times.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Daily, and also tragic loss boards of names getting bigger
every day with all the people looking for their family.
These events are escalating in quantity and severity over time, and.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
That's a factor of climate change.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
It's something that we've been told about since I was
a child, that this was coming, this was the real threat.
I remember as a child being told that, you know,
in fifteen, in twenty years, we're going to start seeing
these effects, and like surprise, everybody, we're here.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
It's that time. And the storms will continue to get worse.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
The wind will blow more, there will be more dry grass,
there will be more lightning, there will be more things
that will cause disasters, whether that's fire or not. But
fire is going to be a big threat coming into
all of our futures. It's too late for us to
begin the small version of recovery from this. The only
(30:05):
way that I personally see us protecting ourselves from this
happening to everybody everywhere, all the time is starting on
really large scale changes immediately, and that means governments and
large corporations taking some accountability around what's happening with our climate.
(30:26):
You have a warning now this can be your town too.
We hear about fires everywhere Texas, California, Canada, like everywhere
there's fires. Nobody deserves to live through what the people
of Lahina have lived through, and nobody deserves to lose
what everyone there has lost. I find a lot of
(30:46):
hope still following this fire, but it's kind of a
yin and yang experience for me. I will say I
have a lot of hope in being alive. I'm grateful
for an opportunity to continue my journey. I didn't think
I was going to have that chance, and I had
(31:07):
resigned myself to that. To have a second shot at things.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Brings a level of clarity to your life.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
I'm hopeful that for me personally, you know there will
still be a brighter tomorrow. Unfortunately that's still tomorrow. I'm
still getting through it.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Welcome back. This is a Live again joining me for
a conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story.
Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Dye, and I'm
your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
One thing that really struck me about this story from
start to finish is her level of storytelling detail in
every single one of these incidents. And I'm wondering if
that's something that struck you as you were talking with her.
Speaker 6 (32:18):
Yeah, what a great storyteller. And the love that she
had for Lahina. You know this her love for the
place of Freeman's love for the place.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
You know.
Speaker 6 (32:27):
It was a heartbreaking story.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
And she talked about at the end there I hear
her telling stories about people reuniting and having these precious
moments of reconnecting and finding their loved ones, and all
the tragedy of those who didn't and will never does
she talk about did she talk about people's hope or resilience? Like,
(32:51):
did she talk much about that?
Speaker 6 (32:53):
I don't think there was time for her to have hope.
I think it was such a constant mirage of horror
that they were surviving minute to minute.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
I think I told you guys once. I was on
a documentary assignment in the island of Samata in Indonesia
after the tsunami hit, and it hit in Christmas two
thousand and four, so I was there shortly like in
February two thousand and five, and there were mass graves,
you know, from this horrific tsudami event, and I witnessed those,
(33:27):
and I witnessed towns that had had eighty percent of
their persons wiped out, so you got twenty percent of
the town left and just complete devastation. And in these
Indonesian people, I saw still the capacity to smile and
laugh and comfort each other. And it just struck me,
I'll never be the same. I couldn't understand how you
(33:49):
could have lost your eighty percent of your village, you know,
and had your entire village wiped out. The only thing
still standing was the mosques because they were open air,
so the water could move through them freely without knocking
them over. But they could. They still had this sense
of laughter, and they were still living. They still had life,
(34:12):
she said.
Speaker 6 (34:12):
One of the benefits of it being in Hawaii as
there was this great Hawaiian music. People would be playing
guitars and singing songs, and so there was a lot
of life in that recovery period for her, for sure.
But then she's lost her livelihood. She's had to move
back to Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
You know.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
Another part of the story was they went through COVID
and were out of work for two years and their
community was finally coming back together when this hit and
just kind of destroyed it. And she also talked about
how much she loved the sea and wanted to be
out there by the ocean, and it's been taken away
from her.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
But yeah, this is I think probably going to be
one of many horrific cautionary tales that we're gonna continue
to hear about, and that.
Speaker 5 (34:57):
Sort of the theme running throughout about humanity's ability to
just really f things up. I mean, because you hear
the first story that she tells about the nuclear test.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
I remember that.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
I remember hearing about that, and it's just so awful.
You know, she has the image of the woman stumbling
toward her on the boat, just everybody believing they have
less than twenty minutes to live, making everybody my ties
and like everybody's calling their families, and then you know
(35:31):
they head for home, and then you hear we're going
back to bustling Leahina, And somewhere in the back of
my head, I thought, oh no, because you know, as
a listener, what's coming next, if you're familiar with these stories.
Speaker 6 (35:44):
Current events, Well, just that whole surreal opening to her
story being out there on the whale watching expedition when
they get this text that nuclear annihilation is coming your way.
You have twenty minutes, and their thought was, well, maybe
we can boat out of the fall zone. And I'm like,
there is no And I just think that's a threat
that we kind of forgotten about. But it's very real.
(36:07):
You know, nuclear proliferation and annihilation is never went away
as a worldwide threat.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
You know, it's worse.
Speaker 6 (36:15):
It's godden worse.
Speaker 5 (36:16):
And you know, like as somebody else said in her story, like,
and I think about this a lot. I'm sure a
lot of us do in this room as writers, as
we experience the world through our five senses, right, Like
that's and so that's the way we convey our world
to others.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
And God, I mean in so many places she does that.
She talks about how.
Speaker 5 (36:33):
She was watching the evolution of the building falling down,
and first the wall disappears and you could see the
interior and these sort of perfectly set tables and then
you look up again and it's sort of twisted metal. Anyway,
It's it's these it's these details, these sensory details of
the heat, all of it that makes the.
Speaker 6 (36:54):
Story so affecting, Like sitting this side of my face
was burned because that's where the wind was coming from.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah, and the sounds of the exploding cars getting closer
and closer. It's just she she captured these sort of
in between moments were the last still living thing is
still being there live and you're watching it burn.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
Right right, And you know, if she wasn't sort of
I guess I, you know, straight up convert about climate
change and it sounds like she, you know, was aware
of that and before, but you know, of course she
is now. And it just sort of made made me
think about how hearing stories like hers, or experiencing this
oneself is the only way, it's the only thing that's
(37:35):
really going to change people.
Speaker 6 (37:37):
I just don't know why it has to be something
you experience firsthand to understand the threat of it, and
I and and my reaction to hearing about it, even
before I spoke with Analyse, was when I heard about
what happened in the Heina, I thought, if a foreign
nation had done this to us, we would go to
war with them immediately. But we're not going to war
against climate change.
Speaker 7 (37:56):
I mean, I mean it's because we it's because we
live in this like corporate hellscape, and it's less about
fixing things for humanity and more about like increasing profit margins.
And it's just like for the oil companies, it's just
it's just cheaper to keep you know, pumping oil out
of the earth, burning it and like raising the cost
(38:19):
of gas, you know, and then spending a chunk of
your profits on lobbying, you know, Congress.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I think about the biodiversity that's already been lost. We're
in the middle of a mass extinction right now that
nobody wants to talk about. And I think about that.
And it's not just the loss of you know, an
accelerated number of species per year, like one hundredfold, but
those species like we're just now starting to understand, you know,
genetics and DNA and the information there. There's so much
(38:50):
adaptive information from millions and millions and years of adaptation
in each one of these species, in each one of
these creatures.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
Yeah, everything else a library that's taken millions of years
to write each book, Each piece of DNA has taken
hundreds of millions of years to re and we're destroying it.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
She's just there's this resilience that humans are capable of,
and you know, anytime I come across it, it's inspiring.
So people who otherwise maybe didn't know they had it
in them, and then all of a sudden they do,
and it gives me some hope.
Speaker 7 (39:25):
For sure. There's nothing more sobering than the consequences of
our actions.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
That's like.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Next time on Alive Again, we hear the story of
Kathy Preston, a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Nazis and hungry.
She lived to become an educator, telling her truth to
thousands of children in the hopes that they move forward
and vigilance and kindness.
Speaker 4 (39:52):
And they kept coming closer and closer, and they were
using their bayonets to rifle through the hay and stab
the hay. They got closer and closer, and then I
hear a thump, and I open an eye and there's
a big black boot next to my face and the
bayonet comes down one inch from this cheek, and.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Then he pulls it out.
Speaker 4 (40:12):
I still remember the noise it made as it came
out of the wood, and I think that's when I
realized what it means to die. I'm not a victim.
I'm a survivor, and I'm going to fight for this
until I stopped talking, because I don't believe that we
have to give up to evil. The only way we
can fight it is to resist it.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brentdye, Nicholas Dakoski,
and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovin, additional music by
Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.
Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our
studio engineers are Rima Elkali and Nams Griffin. Our editors
(40:56):
are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slovitchca, Brit Dye, and Alexander Rodriguez.
Mixing by Ben Lovet and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host,
Dan Bush. Thanks to Analie Cochran for sharing her story.
Alive Again is a production of iHeartRadio and Psychopia Pictures.
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
(41:16):
we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at
Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l
i v e A g A I N P R
O j e C T at gmail dot com.
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
You always hear the question what would you do if
you had twenty minutes left to live? I found out twice.
My name is Anily's Cochran. I survived a nuclear threat
and a climate disaster, and this is my story.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to
(01:03):
remind us all of our shared human condition. Please keep
in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for
some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It was the morning of January thirteenth, twenty and eighteen.
I was working on a fleet of boats out in Maui, Hawaii.
I was the first meet of one of our fleets
of vessels at Pacific Well Foundation. We would take people
(01:39):
out on the water to go on well watching trips,
snorkeling trips, dinner cruises, some set cruises.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
We like to do education on our boats to teach.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
About the whales and the islands, and I was on
microphone when all of a sudden, this sound went off
throughout the boat, coming out of everyone's cell phones all
at once, kind of sounds like an amber alert. There
was over a hundred of us on this relatively small boat,
(02:10):
so it was quite startling. This woman from the back
of the boat was holding her phone out in front
of her and kind of like just staggering and clutching
the chairs as she came down this walkway towards me.
When she held the phone out and I got a
chance to see it, I realized that the alert that
(02:31):
everybody had gotten was a warning that there was a
nuclear missile coming towards us.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It was a beautiful day. The skies were clear and blue,
the water was.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Calm, and we were all about to die. I went
and spoke to my captain a couple of quick googles.
He was able to sort of piece together the amount
of time. He said it would be less than twenty minutes.
My job as the first mate is to be the
person that communicates between the captain and the crew. So
(03:05):
the captain makes orders and then I go and I
delegate that out to the crew and decide who should
be executing what task, and in what order those tasks
should go. We quickly came up with the plan me
and the captain of trying to take our vessel far
away from.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
The wind coming from O Wacoo.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
We felt like a Wahoo would be the most likely
target of a nuclear missile. We decided to just take
our boat out to see far away from any fallout
and hope for the best.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
But we also.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Grabbed life jackets and made nervous people my ties and
called our families and said goodbye, which was really really hard.
You always hear the question what would you do if
you had twenty minutes left to live? Everybody has such
(04:01):
a different reaction to that situation. One of my friends
was a photographer, and he happened to be in the
harbor holding a really nice camera, and so he decided
to set it up to record and built a little
rock structure around it to capture any possible media he could.
He pointed it towards Wahu and hoped that the camera
(04:24):
wouldn't get destroyed. One of my friends cracked a bunch
of bottles of champagne and put them on ice. Another
one of my friends quite literally abandoned one of our
multimillion dollar boats in the harbor. She thought it was
ridiculous to be at work if she had fifteen minutes
left to live, she wanted to be with her dog,
and so she dropped the boat on land.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
And ran to her dog.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
There was a lot of tension between the United States
and North Korea at the time. That made the threat
of a nuclear missile attack much more believable. You know,
when need to just think about geographically too. It would
be most simple to aim a missile at the point
of the US that's closest to North Korea.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
And that would be Hawaii.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I think it was nineteen minutes until they told us
that they had been running a drill that day and
somebody mistook it for a real situation, and so they
had triggered a very real alert. But it was after
the missile would have impacted that we found out that
it was a false alarm. That afternoon, when we came
(05:38):
back to shore, our beautiful town Leahina was bustling with
people who were joyous to have lived through something. The
Lahina is nestled on one of the south facing shores
of Mali, but it's kind of on the western edge.
(05:59):
It used to be the home of the chiefs of Hawaii,
so it was the heart of the Hawaiian Kingdom for
a really really long period of time, and so it
was kind of a crown jewel.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
It was a really really special place.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
There's this underlying richness to the culture there, even though
today it presents like a very tourist town with cute
galleries and experiences on the ocean and restaurants by the seat.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
People that I've.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Come to know in Lehina are incredibly strong and prideful.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
In the best way.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Had moved to an apartment that was right behind Fleetwood's,
which is a bar that's famously owned by Mick Fleetwood
of Fleetwood Mac. It was located right in the center
of Lahaina town on Front Street.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
It was the core of the town. I had lived
in this unit.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That was affordable until it was sold to developers and
they were going to turn it into vacation rentals, which you.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Know, broke our heart.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
There's nowhere for the people who work there to live
that can afford it. We were being priced out of paradise.
So it was a very scary time for our unit.
US residents banded together, did media interviews, talk to local
politicians whatever we could. Ultimately, the county ended up buying
the property back from the developers and kept it as
(07:26):
housing for people that needed it. Because of the action
taken by the residents of our unit. I lived with
people who had a deep tie to Lahina and they
weren't willing to leave. They weren't willing to walk out
of that beautiful place. One of the people that I'm
speaking most fondly of is my next door neighbor, Freeman
(07:48):
Tim Lung. He was an older gentleman who was such
a bright light of a person, and he was always
excited and happy. One of my neighbors, Attina, would just
take him out driving every week to show him Lahina
because he had mobility issues and didn't have a car,
and he was born and raised in Lahina Inna meant
(08:09):
a lot to him. We won the right to stay
in our building right as COVID began to hit the island,
and that was a very devastating time for Mali. Because
we rely heavily on tourism. My company laid off a
lot of employees, as did many other organizations and the
local population began to really feel the effects, and so
(08:34):
coming out of that situation and rebuilding the community, seeing
businesses open again, seeing tourism come back, was a huge weight.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Lifted for many people.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
We had made it through his COVID hump, which was remarkable,
and then the worst they hit our town. On August
eighth of twenty twenty three. Early in the morning, I
had woken up to realize that we had no power,
(09:08):
self service was limited.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
The weather was stormy.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
It was incredibly windy, some of the strongest gusts of
wind I had ever seen. I remember that morning actually
taking a video outside of my window, thinking, you know, wow,
the wind is never whistled like this, like it's making
this sound. It's almost like there's somebody singing on the wind.
(09:37):
It's so different sounding than any wind I've ever heard before.
There had been a fire that morning up the mountain
from us. Not very long after the fire began, they
had posted one hundred percent contained, everything's fine. Stand down
(10:00):
to all of the fire crews with up the mountain
on the other side of the island to go fight
a fire that was happening there. I was in my
apartment at about three pm or so when I just
kind of noticed the faintest smell of smoke in the air,
just a little tiny hint of it. Freeman, my next
(10:23):
door neighbor, was standing in his doorway as well.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
So I asked him.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
I was like, Freeman, do you smell something? And He's like, no, no, no,
I don't smell anything. So I was like, Okay, maybe
I'm just being a little oversensitive. A lot of us
were used to them, like burning the sugar cane fields,
and like the smell of just this burning that's kind
of throughout the town constantly. So I went back inside.
(10:49):
I took a really really quick shower, and then I
was sitting inside and I heard something I couldn't even
place what it was. It was just like the weirdest sound.
The fact that I could hear anything over the wind
was startling to me, and so I went outside and
(11:10):
I realized that what I was hearing was the personal
fire detectors from all of the houses on my street.
This point, the sky was black, and we realized it
was like a really really bad situation. We started to
(11:35):
actually at that point really strategize about, like what does
evacuation look like? And I remember my neighbor Steve almost
jokingly being like, well, hey, at least we've always got
an ocean.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
You can't burn in an ocean.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Right, Embers started to fly over our heads and land
on the buildings, and he was spraying the embers with
a hose, you know, he would spray one in ten
would fall, and then he would get another one, and
a twenty would fall. And it was becoming this exponential
problem where it's like, hey man, you can't put all
of these out.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
There's no way.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
And we're also starting to lose time, and at this
point his wife began to.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Screen that they needed to go.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I have a video where the sky would go hitch
black and then it would open up for the split
second as the wind would like rush through all the
spoke was clear, and it would be like you'd realized
it was daytime, and then it would just be nighttime again.
As those embers started to burn, we made the call
that we have to go. Freeman didn't want to leave,
(12:38):
and we just kept telling him he had to.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I was trying to get them both to come into
my car.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Freeman, for whatever reason, didn't want to get in, and
Atina said that She wanted to take him down to
Front Street by foot, which was concerning to me, but
also there's so little time to fight people. In a
moment like that, I saw the like walk away as
like fires kind of like appeared between me and them,
and at that point I lost sight of them. Behind
(13:09):
that wall of fire, I began driving into the most
pitch black I've ever seen. It's not driving through smoke,
it's driving through a solid, opaque wall. I couldn't even
(13:30):
see the hood of my own car. People were driving
up onto the sidewalks, trying to get around parked cars
or cars that were being hesitant to move forward. With
winds that one hundred and twenty miles per hour, that
fire moves at a rate I can't I don't even
have words to express how pickly a fire was running
(13:51):
towards you.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
It was monumental.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
At one point, a tourist named Naim popped into my
car in a panic and he said, turn and go
up the mountain.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I had to tell him, like, that's where I just
came from.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
The fire's coming from that direction, and he's like, well,
I just came from down the road the other direction
from us, and there's fire there too, and as I
was like, I'm not going up the mountain, and so
he got out of my car and he disappeared into
the wall of s Hope. Fortunately, right about that time,
I saw Freeman and Atina making it on foot to
(14:37):
this exact same area, so I jumped out to talk
quickly with Atina and Freeman. We assisted Freeman up and
over this rock wall, which was challenging because of the
dropped out on the other side. At this point, the
wind was as extreme as it had been all night.
It was whipping. You have this rain of fire that's
(15:03):
just coming down on your body and burning you, and
you can't avoid it with light.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Your clothes on fire.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
And there was about one hundred people gathered on the coast.
People's hair was catching no fire. There was multiple times
I like shouted down to somebody, like you were on fire.
Some people had already got into the ocean and begun
drifting out to sea. I saw that there's people in
the ocean, but I couldn't even see how far out
people were going to. You just couldn't see that far.
And you're looking through squintid eyes the whole time, and
(15:30):
you're trying to blink constantly, cause your eyes are full
of soot and ash.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
And.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
It was very hot.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
It's hard to describe, like the radiating heat that comes
from an entire town burning down. The ground itself began
to heat up like an oven, and we were sitting
on old lava rocks. I was cooking, but I was
very clear headed, and I thought more about, you know,
(16:04):
what it would truly take to survive each moment and
each woe, It being a small decision, not looking at
the big picture, but like what do I do right now?
It was concerned about the quality of the air, so
you just can't breathe in this thick smoke. Additionally to
the smoke, you have this rain of fire that's just
coming down on your body constantly. I knew at that
(16:32):
point that I was going to be out here for
a long time. Before I left my house, I grabbed
everything I could and shoved it into an Ikea bag,
and I grabbed the most important thing, which was my
pet burd After we got a Tina and Freeman over
the wall, I went back to my car to get
out of the smoke and the falling embers, as well
(16:54):
as to spend some final moments with my bird, and
I ultimately fed her what would be her vital meal.
My bird was flightless, and so I knew the safest
place for it would be in my car, and so
I left it behind, closed the door and got into
the ocean. The ember is falling on your skin, just burned,
(17:22):
and so you know the coolness of the water with
a little bit.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Of a comfort.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
We didn't want to go too far out because there
was sharks and currents, and it was nighttime. The waves
are just pushing you around, and Freeman couldn't have kept
himself up in the surf, and so he stayed on
the rocks. The wind was pushing flaming debris all around us,
(17:50):
while the ocean was being just whipped up by this
intense wind, and all around you could just hear the
scream of people panicked and confused. I heard screams of
terror that were deep and real. Slowly, over the course
of the next hour, so the building that was across
(18:13):
the street from us became completely engulfed in flames. We
tried not to watch, because it's traumatic to watch the
things you love just disappear in front of you. The
area that we had been in was a really, really cleat,
little walking part of town. Throughout the course of the night,
you know, the scenery changed on us dramatically. These buildings
(18:38):
that were so beautiful, kind of historic, old timey looking buildings.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
You see them go up into flames, and then they.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Would just sort of it's hard to describe the way
that they would just kind of collapse in on themselves,
like they gave a big sigh.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
And just sort of imploded. It was just so horrifying.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
And also, you know, it hurts your eyes the light
and the smoke and everything, and we want to shield
your face from the heat. We all got very badly
burned on our faces from just the heat of everything happening,
but also from our masks rubbing up against our noses.
I would stop throughout the night and kind of peek
my head over the rock wall and just sort of
(19:21):
see how everything was progressing. And I just remember specifically
the building that was across from us.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
It went through this.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Evolution where the walls kind of burnt off of it,
but you could see inside and the tables were still
set as if they were going to do dinner service
that night. And then you look away for another moment
and look back and now the building's gone and it's
just a one foot pile of rubble on the ground.
The biggest threat that we were facing was the smoke.
(19:49):
We were submerging ourselves in the shallowest of the water.
We wanted to be close enough that we felt land
underneath our feet, but we wanted to be far enough
from the fire or that we could breathe, and we
weren't getting hit with the embers as heavily in the water.
Somewhere around seven PM, we began to hear explosions coming
(20:16):
down the road towards us, one after the other after
the other, and there was hundreds of them. We realized
that it was the cars that were parked that were exploding.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
All throughout town. All these people had abandoned their cars.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
There's like a hundred of us, all of our vehicles
parked behind our heads.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
The ground was beginning to shake with every single explosion.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I was beginning to get very, very fearful, especially because
now we're we're hiding behind this rock wall, and there's
there's a car, you know, two feet on the other
side of that rock wall from us, and the second
that it explodes, are these rocks going to come tumbling
down on us. The fumes that come off of a
car explosion are noxious. We could not breathe. You would inhale,
(21:10):
but there was no oxygen. I remember at one point
looking over to A Tina because I realized like suddenly
I wasn't I wasn't breathing, and I tried to say
to her, I can't breathe, and I didn't.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Have a voice.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Finally, is able to kind of like whisper to her
like I can't talk, and she said the same thing
back to me.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
I heard it in her voice too.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
We kind of like gestured to each other like we
should go towards Freeman, and we both stood up and
we walked maybe five feet, and I've I've never felt
such a level of like extreme exhaustion and oxygen deprivation,
and like I'm a free diver. I lived in a
(21:56):
world of oxygen deprivation. I was used to the thee
of having a lot of carbon dioxide in your system,
like that's actually something I had specifically trained for it.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
And I couldn't walk one more step.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
I walked about five feet and I quite literally collapsed
on the ground. A Tina did as well, and I
was like I can't get to him, and she said
I can't either.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
We were in the surf.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
There was moments where we were holding each other's hands,
and sometimes we would just squeeze each other's hands to
let each other know that we were there because we
would lose consciousness. I just remember kind of trying to
like like whisper talk. Every once in a while. It
was like, just keep breathing, stay awake. And there's times
I saw her drifting away and I would pull her bag.
(22:43):
And there's times I was dripped away and she pulled
me back. It was close to dying, and in that
moment everything got quiet. All of the explosions sounded like
popping popcorn and it was just like pop pop pop,
and it felt like I could just go to sleep
(23:08):
and everything would just be okay. I had a vision
of multiple bright, bright blue lights that were just dancing
around my field of vision. I'm not a super religious person,
(23:29):
but I just feel like I had loving arms around
me that night. I think that's what I was seeing
in that moment, like the souls of the people that
were protecting me. I fell unconscious while I was belly
down in the water, and my head would collapse and
my lips would hit the surface of the water, and
(23:50):
that feeling of water on my lips would jolt me
back to alertness, and I would remember, like I have
to keep breathing, Like if you put your head down,
you're gonna drown.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
I'm so grateful to the ocean itself when there was
a fire on three sides of us to be this
like open.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Arms of comfort, and for that moment of like, as
I was quite literally losing my own life, it was
going to be my reminder to keep breathing. The wind
was still just bearing down on us the whole night,
and it blew some of that, like those most horrible
fumes away. Suddenly I could talk again. I looked at
(24:31):
a teen and I was like, hey, we're here, and
I remember her looking at me. She goes, you are shaking.
I was extremely hypothermic from just laying motionless in the
water for as long as I had been. I had
to warm up my body, and so I actually ended
up climbing back.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Up over the rock wall and.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Huddled down like near the the embers of Waikiki Brewery
as it was like finished. She gets burned down to
the ground just to get some warmth from the fire.
I burned myself badly doing that, but but it was
the only way to stay warm. Once I had regained
(25:15):
my senses, I shouted to a teena that I wanted
to check on Freeman. We both started making our way
towards him, she on the rocks and me on the road.
And I made it to him first, and I found
that he had passed away, and there was just nothing
I could do, and I had to resign myself to say, like,
(25:36):
I can't.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I can't do anything for him, it's too late.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Back when we were fighting for the right to stay
in Lahina as residents, Freeman had spoken to a news
outlet and was quoted saying I was born in Lehina
and I will die in Lahina. Lohina was so important
to Freeman, and Freeman was so important to Leahina that
I'm glad that Freeman never had to see Lahina gone.
(26:09):
At about nine or nine thirty PM, and I was
able to finally make a call out to the police
and say that we needed to rescue. They were able
to confirm that they knew we were there. Other people
had called in already and said that we were there,
but that they didn't honestly know how to rescue us
at that moment. The situation was obviously a tough one.
(26:31):
They couldn't get their rescue vehicles to where we were
because of just all the debris in the road down lines,
the town was still on fire. Everything was making it
hard to rescue, and they didn't know when they could
help us. I remember telling Atina, like, we don't need
to eat tonight. It's okay, It'll be fine. We can
survive this. We have the fire and embers to keep
(26:51):
us warm. We have the ocean to keep us cool, like,
we'll live through this.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Rescue didn't come for us until after midnight. Are all
to bit Rescue was well later. We had quite a
prolonged period of time just kind of waiting after the
fire was out, which was a surreal experience. I began
to sort of wander around the street and see some
of the destruction, things like all of the rims of
(27:18):
all the cars. The aluminum wheels were melted to the ground,
and you would just see these streams of melted silver
metal running through the streets.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
It was remarkably quiet.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
I think there was a lot of people around, but
nobody was really talking to each other. We were all
sort of just quietly taking it all in and moving
around the scene, just kind of looking at all these
things that suddenly looked so different than they had just
a couple of hours earlier.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
There was fire on all sides.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Since it was like a whole two blocks away, at
that point, it felt much less threatening than it had
all night, and I was like, oh, I'm safe to
take a nap now, which is wild in retrospect. I
laid down the sidewalk and I took about a ten
minute nap, and then the fire trucks came back to
rescue us. At that first shelter that I was at,
(28:13):
there was a heavy focus on like figuring out the
medical needs. My injuries that I sustained included mostly burns.
I burned my rear end very badly from sitting on
the rocks. I have very significant scarring on my legs.
I have a lot of cuts from being bashed against
the rocks all night. All of the scars on my
left hand side of my body are much much worse
(28:36):
than the right hand side because that's the side that
the wind was coming at us from. I had ash
coming out of my ears and my nose and my
eyes everything for a remarkably long time. For the first
few days, there was no cell phone signal over there,
so nobody could contact family tell.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Them that they were safe.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
We got to see some beautiful moments, like families reconnecting,
the tears of parents finding their children out of shelter.
There's no words, There are no words to describe the
amount of love and emotion in that moment of reconnection.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
I saw that playing out multiple times.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Daily, and also tragic loss boards of names getting bigger
every day with all the people looking for their family.
These events are escalating in quantity and severity over time, and.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
That's a factor of climate change.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
It's something that we've been told about since I was
a child, that this was coming, this was the real threat.
I remember as a child being told that, you know,
in fifteen, in twenty years, we're going to start seeing
these effects, and like surprise, everybody, we're here.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
It's that time. And the storms will continue to get worse.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
The wind will blow more, there will be more dry grass,
there will be more lightning, there will be more things
that will cause disasters, whether that's fire or not. But
fire is going to be a big threat coming into
all of our futures. It's too late for us to
begin the small version of recovery from this. The only
(30:05):
way that I personally see us protecting ourselves from this
happening to everybody everywhere, all the time is starting on
really large scale changes immediately, and that means governments and
large corporations taking some accountability around what's happening with our climate.
(30:26):
You have a warning now this can be your town too.
We hear about fires everywhere Texas, California, Canada, like everywhere
there's fires. Nobody deserves to live through what the people
of Lahina have lived through, and nobody deserves to lose
what everyone there has lost. I find a lot of
(30:46):
hope still following this fire, but it's kind of a
yin and yang experience for me. I will say I
have a lot of hope in being alive. I'm grateful
for an opportunity to continue my journey. I didn't think
I was going to have that chance, and I had
(31:07):
resigned myself to that. To have a second shot at things.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Brings a level of clarity to your life.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
I'm hopeful that for me personally, you know there will
still be a brighter tomorrow. Unfortunately that's still tomorrow. I'm
still getting through it.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Welcome back. This is a Live again joining me for
a conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story.
Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Dye, and I'm
your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
One thing that really struck me about this story from
start to finish is her level of storytelling detail in
every single one of these incidents. And I'm wondering if
that's something that struck you as you were talking with her.
Speaker 6 (32:18):
Yeah, what a great storyteller. And the love that she
had for Lahina. You know this her love for the
place of Freeman's love for the place.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
You know.
Speaker 6 (32:27):
It was a heartbreaking story.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
And she talked about at the end there I hear
her telling stories about people reuniting and having these precious
moments of reconnecting and finding their loved ones, and all
the tragedy of those who didn't and will never does
she talk about did she talk about people's hope or resilience? Like,
(32:51):
did she talk much about that?
Speaker 6 (32:53):
I don't think there was time for her to have hope.
I think it was such a constant mirage of horror
that they were surviving minute to minute.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
I think I told you guys once. I was on
a documentary assignment in the island of Samata in Indonesia
after the tsunami hit, and it hit in Christmas two
thousand and four, so I was there shortly like in
February two thousand and five, and there were mass graves,
you know, from this horrific tsudami event, and I witnessed those,
(33:27):
and I witnessed towns that had had eighty percent of
their persons wiped out, so you got twenty percent of
the town left and just complete devastation. And in these
Indonesian people, I saw still the capacity to smile and
laugh and comfort each other. And it just struck me,
I'll never be the same. I couldn't understand how you
(33:49):
could have lost your eighty percent of your village, you know,
and had your entire village wiped out. The only thing
still standing was the mosques because they were open air,
so the water could move through them freely without knocking
them over. But they could. They still had this sense
of laughter, and they were still living. They still had life,
(34:12):
she said.
Speaker 6 (34:12):
One of the benefits of it being in Hawaii as
there was this great Hawaiian music. People would be playing
guitars and singing songs, and so there was a lot
of life in that recovery period for her, for sure.
But then she's lost her livelihood. She's had to move
back to Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
You know.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
Another part of the story was they went through COVID
and were out of work for two years and their
community was finally coming back together when this hit and
just kind of destroyed it. And she also talked about
how much she loved the sea and wanted to be
out there by the ocean, and it's been taken away
from her.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
But yeah, this is I think probably going to be
one of many horrific cautionary tales that we're gonna continue
to hear about, and that.
Speaker 5 (34:57):
Sort of the theme running throughout about humanity's ability to
just really f things up. I mean, because you hear
the first story that she tells about the nuclear test.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
I remember that.
Speaker 5 (35:10):
I remember hearing about that, and it's just so awful.
You know, she has the image of the woman stumbling
toward her on the boat, just everybody believing they have
less than twenty minutes to live, making everybody my ties
and like everybody's calling their families, and then you know
(35:31):
they head for home, and then you hear we're going
back to bustling Leahina, And somewhere in the back of
my head, I thought, oh no, because you know, as
a listener, what's coming next, if you're familiar with these stories.
Speaker 6 (35:44):
Current events, Well, just that whole surreal opening to her
story being out there on the whale watching expedition when
they get this text that nuclear annihilation is coming your way.
You have twenty minutes, and their thought was, well, maybe
we can boat out of the fall zone. And I'm like,
there is no And I just think that's a threat
that we kind of forgotten about. But it's very real.
(36:07):
You know, nuclear proliferation and annihilation is never went away
as a worldwide threat.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
You know, it's worse.
Speaker 6 (36:15):
It's godden worse.
Speaker 5 (36:16):
And you know, like as somebody else said in her story, like,
and I think about this a lot. I'm sure a
lot of us do in this room as writers, as
we experience the world through our five senses, right, Like
that's and so that's the way we convey our world
to others.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
And God, I mean in so many places she does that.
She talks about how.
Speaker 5 (36:33):
She was watching the evolution of the building falling down,
and first the wall disappears and you could see the
interior and these sort of perfectly set tables and then
you look up again and it's sort of twisted metal. Anyway,
It's it's these it's these details, these sensory details of
the heat, all of it that makes the.
Speaker 6 (36:54):
Story so affecting, Like sitting this side of my face
was burned because that's where the wind was coming from.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah, and the sounds of the exploding cars getting closer
and closer. It's just she she captured these sort of
in between moments were the last still living thing is
still being there live and you're watching it burn.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
Right right, And you know, if she wasn't sort of
I guess I, you know, straight up convert about climate
change and it sounds like she, you know, was aware
of that and before, but you know, of course she
is now. And it just sort of made made me
think about how hearing stories like hers, or experiencing this
oneself is the only way, it's the only thing that's
(37:35):
really going to change people.
Speaker 6 (37:37):
I just don't know why it has to be something
you experience firsthand to understand the threat of it, and
I and and my reaction to hearing about it, even
before I spoke with Analyse, was when I heard about
what happened in the Heina, I thought, if a foreign
nation had done this to us, we would go to
war with them immediately. But we're not going to war
against climate change.
Speaker 7 (37:56):
I mean, I mean it's because we it's because we
live in this like corporate hellscape, and it's less about
fixing things for humanity and more about like increasing profit margins.
And it's just like for the oil companies, it's just
it's just cheaper to keep you know, pumping oil out
of the earth, burning it and like raising the cost
(38:19):
of gas, you know, and then spending a chunk of
your profits on lobbying, you know, Congress.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I think about the biodiversity that's already been lost. We're
in the middle of a mass extinction right now that
nobody wants to talk about. And I think about that.
And it's not just the loss of you know, an
accelerated number of species per year, like one hundredfold, but
those species like we're just now starting to understand, you know,
genetics and DNA and the information there. There's so much
(38:50):
adaptive information from millions and millions and years of adaptation
in each one of these species, in each one of
these creatures.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
Yeah, everything else a library that's taken millions of years
to write each book, Each piece of DNA has taken
hundreds of millions of years to re and we're destroying it.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
She's just there's this resilience that humans are capable of,
and you know, anytime I come across it, it's inspiring.
So people who otherwise maybe didn't know they had it
in them, and then all of a sudden they do,
and it gives me some hope.
Speaker 7 (39:25):
For sure. There's nothing more sobering than the consequences of
our actions.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
That's like.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Next time on Alive Again, we hear the story of
Kathy Preston, a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Nazis and hungry.
She lived to become an educator, telling her truth to
thousands of children in the hopes that they move forward
and vigilance and kindness.
Speaker 4 (39:52):
And they kept coming closer and closer, and they were
using their bayonets to rifle through the hay and stab
the hay. They got closer and closer, and then I
hear a thump, and I open an eye and there's
a big black boot next to my face and the
bayonet comes down one inch from this cheek, and.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Then he pulls it out.
Speaker 4 (40:12):
I still remember the noise it made as it came
out of the wood, and I think that's when I
realized what it means to die. I'm not a victim.
I'm a survivor, and I'm going to fight for this
until I stopped talking, because I don't believe that we
have to give up to evil. The only way we
can fight it is to resist it.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brentdye, Nicholas Dakoski,
and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovin, additional music by
Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.
Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our
studio engineers are Rima Elkali and Nams Griffin. Our editors
(40:56):
are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slovitchca, Brit Dye, and Alexander Rodriguez.
Mixing by Ben Lovet and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host,
Dan Bush. Thanks to Analie Cochran for sharing her story.
Alive Again is a production of iHeartRadio and Psychopia Pictures.
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
(41:16):
we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at
Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l
i v e A g A I N P R
O j e C T at gmail dot com.
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