December 16, 2025 • 49 mins
On the day after Christmas, Dwayne Meadows was packing for a beach day in Thailand when a distant “white line” on the sea became a wall of water. Swept through his bungalow and into a churning maze of debris, he fought to breathe, said goodbye to his six-year-old son in his mind, and surfaced into chaos—cars, propane tanks, entire bungalows surging past. Grabbing the lower half of a mannequin for flotation, he navigated toward shore, then helped lead other survivors to higher ground and improvised first aid for the injured until medical professionals arrived. In the months that followed, Dwayne grappled with the scale of loss and turned toward service—returning to Thailand, aiding recovery efforts, and applying his marine-biology skills to disaster mapping and reef restoration. This is a story about presence under pressure, the power of small kindnesses, and honoring the lives lost by the life you live after.
Content note: This episode includes descriptions of a catastrophic natural disaster (2004 Indian Ocean tsunami), near-drowning, serious injury, mass casualties, and trauma/PTSD. Listener discretion advised.
Story Producer: Brent Dey
If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story! Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com We’d love to hear your story!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
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 (00:14):
My name is Dwayne Meadows. On the day after Christmas
in two thousand and four, I survive one of the
world's worst natural disasters. To this day, what gets me
through thinking about it is thinking about all of the
helpful things that people did in the face of this
(00:36):
immense disaster. There was so much help that made things
even just a little bit better for everyone.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
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 exp periences and more broadly, brushes
with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share
(01:06):
these stories to 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 (01:20):
I grew up in rural Ohio, but I was a
swimmer and I always love the water. Early on, as
a child, I wanted to learn how to scuba dive,
and so I was able to get certified at the
age of fifteen. I had lots of little farm ponds
and lakes around me, very small, and I would go
(01:40):
and grab my gear and ask the ask the owners
if I could just scuba dive and see what was
in their lakes. That kept me occupied as a teenager.
From there, I decided I would go to college to
learn how to be a marine biologist. It turned out
to be something that was really interesting and people were
(02:03):
willing to pay me to go to interesting places to
look at interesting animals.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I had the.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Opportunity to go visit a college friend who was from
and lived and worked in Thailand, and I got there
on Christmas Day in the afternoon, so it was a holiday.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
People were celebrating and.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Taking the time off, and I met a young German woman, Caroline,
who was looking for the same resort that I was
staying at, and we ended up talking about scuba diving.
We decided to meet in the morning and maybe go
snorkeling on the nice beaches that they had there. It
(02:48):
was a lovely, beautiful sunny day, and after we finished
our breakfast, we both decided we needed to go back
to our rooms, but we agreed to meet in just
fifteen minutes and unfortunately, that's when everything really started.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
I was back in.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
My bungalow, a little two room building right on the beach,
looking out on the sea.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
It was gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I started to throw laundry into a big backpack, and
I heard a scream, and then I looked out to
the ocean and I saw some distance out, now, maybe
a mile or something, this white line far out in
the ocean.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
That looked like some kind of small wave.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I knew it was a tsunami, but I thought, oh,
this is just a tiny, little little wave out in
the distance, and I thought I was going to be safe.
My bungalow was kind of up off the sand. It
was on a slope, and there were maybe five or
six steps up to the actual level of my room,
so I figured I was a little bit above the
(04:00):
water level. Just to be safe. I thought, Oh, I'm
gonna take my clothes and throw this backpack up on
top of this armor furniture, and it's all gonna be good.
Maybe I'm gonna get my feet wet, but this kind
of little wave might wash through and it's no big deal.
(04:21):
So I wasn't really scared at that point, but very
quickly that started to change. The next thing I remember,
the water just comes gushing into my room and almost
immediately fills it up. There was no time to get out,
and I just kind of remember bracing myself and thinking
(04:46):
I could hold on and ride it out and see
what happened, or this building is just going to be
a death trap. Everything just exploded as the wave came in,
and I found myself underwater, just spinning and twisting and
completely disoriented and not knowing what way was up and
(05:09):
whether I could really survive just the force of the water.
I convince myself, I need to just calm down. My
air supply will last longer if I lower my heartbeat.
(05:29):
This is what we learn when we're diving and snarkling.
I was tossing and turning, and I could feel myself
flipping around just like a.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
You know, rag dollar whatever they say.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I was thinking I would swim up, but I had
no idea which direction was actually up. I still felt
myself twisting and turning, so I felt very helpless. The
reality of the fact that I was not maybe gonna
(06:20):
be able to make it out of this started to
settle in. I remember very distinctly saying goodbye to my
son who was like six years old at that point
and wasn't with me on this day.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
He was still back home with his mother.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
We were divorced, and thinking about my other family members
and my parents were still alive. Time just seemed to expand.
I don't know how long it lasted, but there were
so many visions of my life during that time, and
(07:00):
I felt like that's what I was really seeing in
front of me. As I was still in this dark,
dark water, kind of just felt myself almost giving up
to these thoughts and not really thinking about how to swim.
(07:21):
With my training, I had been able to hold my
breath for three or four minutes underwater. I'm guessing with
all the stress and adrenaline and everything of this, it
was probably more like a minute.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
And a half.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Out of nowhere, I ended up popping up to the
surface of the water, you know. I remember that feeling
of relief and almost euphoria surviving this thing like quickly
changed to another sense of Oh my god, this is horrible.
(08:00):
The water was moving incredibly fast, like a whitewater rafting trip,
and very quickly I was feeling lots of stuff hitting me,
and as I start to look around, I can see
debris everywhere now, and I mean cars floating in the water, bungalows,
(08:21):
whole bungalows floating, and trees and wood with nails. And
they used a lot of propane tanks, I think for
heating or cooling your refrigerators and whatever, and some of
those were spewing gas and you could hear the hissing
sound everywhere in the background, so it was very loud
(08:42):
and still like crunching of debris, and the debris was
coming into like big piles that were many, many feet high,
so you couldn't see very far even if you really
wanted to, because the piles were starting to come together,
and the buildings were breaking up, and the metal was
(09:03):
creaking like all these different sounds on top of screams.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
I heard lots of people.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
In the water screaming, but I never saw any for
the longest time, because there was so much debris between us,
and even the water itself was quite big, waves especially
and just mud. The water was so full of mud.
It was so chaotic with so many things in the
(09:32):
water that I felt that I could only like look
ahead of me and try to block things with my
hands from hitting my face and my chest, and kind
of my vital organs.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Was so rapid fire that like.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
You couldn't really like look ahead of you and see something,
even if it was thirty feet in front of you.
You know, I really started to get in a little
panicked at all of the things that were hitting me
and just not being able to really relax at all.
And I remember something pulling me under and realizing that
(10:12):
I was barely above water and I had like strap
on Tiva sandals, and something had gotten between my heel
and the sandal and was pulling me under.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
It was heavy.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
I have no idea what it was, but I reached
down take my sandal off, and just unconsciously I put
a sandal on my wrist. It just kept going and going.
At some point there, probably a few minutes, I ran
into a palm tree. And I had been noticing that
(10:48):
the water level was basically the tops of palm trees.
And if you've you know, you ever spend any time
at a tropical beach, you know, those things are thirty
forty to fifty feet tall, And it made me realize
just how deep the water was. Clearly I was somewhere
actually over what should have been land as I was
(11:10):
grabbing onto the tree. Basically the water was still hitting
my back. It was coming from behind me, and so
the debris now instead of kind of floating with me,
was hitting me, and sometimes hard, like enough that it
would sort of knock your breath out almost.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
So I just decided to let go and again.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Was floating in this kind of giant river. I finally
found the thing that really I think kind of saved me,
which was.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
A mannequin.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I had the lower half, just the legs and kind
of the waist, and I hugged it close to my
chest and it was helping me stay a little bit
out of water and catch my breath. And we just
cruised along like that. As the water kind of slowed down,
I could finally start to look around me. I realized
(12:14):
I was actually really in the ocean. Now, there there
was ocean. There was the mountains behind me, but nothing
nothing looked familiar. I really had no idea exactly where
I was, and it was sort of hard to look
around at this point. There was so there were big
piles of debris, wood trees, you know, I could see
(12:36):
where the shore was. I wasn't that far out. I
kept the mannequin with me. I had kind of started
to feel my body come down from all the adrenaline,
and I could tell at some point my knee was
hurting and it felt like things had been messed up
in some way.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
I couldn't really tell. I couldn't see in the water.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
But I thought, oh, this man would be a really
nice crutch when I got to shore.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
But I'll keep this.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
And I also remember at some point thinking, this is
like a great momento, and I really wanted to keep it.
And so I was swimming with this mannequin. It was
not a straight line from where I was to the
shore because of all of this debris, and so I
had to swim kind of round about probably half a
(13:28):
mile to get this a quarter mile, and during that
time I could hear people screaming asking for help. I
didn't see any other people except the one person I
saw on a bungalow that I was swimming very nearby.
It was a tie woman, so I could just tell
she was upset and hurt, but she was actually all
(13:52):
the way on the top of a roof, like her
hands hanging over the peak of the roof, so she
was almost completely out of the water. And able to
kind of catch her breath and rest. But she knew
that she, like me, was also far out in the
ocean and needed to get back to shore, and so
(14:14):
I assumed she wanted help, and I swam over to
this floating bungalow and I reached out the mannequin and
she understood what I was saying, and she was willing to.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Give it a try.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
I kind of said, I'm going to go with you
and we'll go into shore. And she came down into
the water and she grabbed onto the mannequin, but she just,
you know, her face was just barely above the water,
and she just freaked out. I don't think she knew
how to swim. She was kicking and screaming, and I
(14:53):
couldn't get her to calm down, and she didn't want
to stay in the water.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I thought I could maybe like tow.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Her in, but at the end she just climbed back
up on the roof and I remember kind of motioning
to her that I would swim in and then come
back out to get her, and I meant it.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
At the time. It was silly.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
I had really no idea what things were really like
on shore, but I really meant it, and it haunted
me for a long time afterwards that I wasn't able
to find her again. As I got closer to shore,
(15:39):
I noticed these rocks that were along the coast, very
close to the beach. And the thing that caught my
attention though, was that there were snails and muscleshells and
other marine life that were growing on this rock. But
they were six or seven feet out of the water,
(15:59):
and I knew that that was too high to be natural,
that they were too far above the current water level
that I was swimming in for that to be natural.
So what that told me as a marine biologist was
that the water level was too low. That rock should
have only been two feet out of water, and it
was six feet or seven feet out of water. And
(16:21):
that's how I knew there was another wave coming. I
just thought, I can't do this again. I can't survive
another wave. It was clear from where I was at
that the wave had gone a long way into shore
(16:44):
and that I was nowhere near to the safety that
I had just thought I was at. I swam as
quickly as I could to shore and got out, but
I was very depressed at that point as I started
to walk. I could tell pretty quickly that my leg
was injured, that I was going to be limping. My
(17:05):
hip felt weird. I mean, I had cuts everywhere on
my body. In front of me, there was kind of
a newer resort building, like concrete, unlike most of the
bamboo kind of bungalows that most of us had stayed in.
It was three stories tall, was a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Of it was just gone. All the windows and glass
and some of the walls were gone, but it was.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Still kind of there, and there was a gap between
that one building and another, and so I started working
my way in that direction. And it was at that
point that I really started to come across other survivors.
Some people were just completely hysterical, screaming for their loved ones,
(17:52):
their children especially, or partners. And I kind of suggested
that maybe we should go up, hopefully the main road
was okay or somewhere where there were more people, like
another wave might be coming. And it's not say.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
We were all alive.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
And while we saw a good share of dead bodies
on the beach, it seemed like a lot of people
had made it. And I remember, you know, using that
logic with people to suggest that you know their loved
ones probably made it. The fact that I came out
of the water very far from where I had started.
(18:45):
When I was talking with people about like where their
loved ones might be and why they weren't in the
same place they were for some people that worked, and
of course for some people they you know, we're just
completely distraught. It was at that point that I realized
I still had my sandal and I was the only
person who had any kind of footwear in our group
(19:06):
of there's probably five or six people at that point,
and I said, Okay, I'm going to put my sandal on,
and I went in front of the group of people
and just kind of shuffled my way through some of
these puddles that we just couldn't avoid, to kind of
make sure we weren't like stepping on anything like really sharp.
There were enormous piles of debris and puddles kind of
(19:28):
just like in the ocean, like I described earlier, and
so we had this crazy little trail of people making
our way through this debris and trying not to hurt
ourselves any worse. We ran across some tie or Burmese
workers that had been working on construction in the area
that were mourning a dead relative that was there. We
(19:53):
were able to convince them to join us in leaving,
and it was like right at that point that somebody
in the group looked back and saw kind of exactly
what we saw the first time, was another white line
on the horizon and the wave coming in. Everybody just
sort of started to scatter and make their way up
(20:15):
the hill as best they could, and we were just
very lucky that for us the second wave turned out
to be not as big as the first one, but
in some places the second wave was bigger than the first.
There was basically one main road and behind it there
was mostly a mountain and a national park with the
(20:38):
forest land, and the main road had additional hotels and
restaurants and shops. Somebody, I think, motioned us over and
had some bottles of water, and there were a few chairs,
and I remember there was a tai Man who was
running a little tourist shop and he stepped out and
(20:59):
he offered me a baseball hat and he pointed to
the sun and it said something in a little bit
of broken English, and you know, convinced me I needed
a hat to protect myself from sunburn. It was just
the smallest things at that point were just so amazingly
helpful and useful. And I was at that point that
(21:24):
a man came by on a motorcycle and said, oh,
there's another wave coming. It's not safe here. You should
go up, and he pointed me up towards this resort
that was up on a hillside. And as I was
going along, I came across this young Swiss girl at
(21:46):
fourteen fifteen something like that. She told me her name,
and she said she was missing her family and siblings,
and she was very distraught and crying and upset. And
I said, oh, come with me, we'll look for your family.
I was, you know, by myself. I was missing Caroline,
this friend I had met the day before, but I
(22:07):
didn't have those family connections that a lot of people.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Were worried about.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
And so she and I walked and we eventually came
up this kind.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Of state dirt road. There was like a hotel.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Check in administration area and a couple of buildings and
then a lot of little bungalows spread out. They sort
of had like a triage area set up, and we're
trying to figure out who had injuries that needed attending
to and I said, well, but I've got some advanced
first aid training which I had gotten through my work.
(22:41):
I could give IVS fluids to people, I could do stitches,
and so I said, give me a couple of minutes
and I'll help you guys out. I need to kind
of catch my breath. I was still really like hyperventilating
and just breathing hard and stressed and coming down from
all this adrenaline, I think, and.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
I did that.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
I took the girl over and we sat in the
shade between a couple of bungalows with a bunch of
other people.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
It was horrible. It was the worst part of the day,
at least after getting out of the water.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Part, because you felt helpless and you were looking at
some people who were still hysterical, crying and screaming, some
of them in pain from injuries, some of them pretty
sure that some family member relative was seriously heard or
had died they maybe have seen something happen. And other
(23:41):
people who were just catatonic, they just weren't moving at all,
just blank stares. I asked somebody else to look after
the Swiss girl, and just as I had sort of
done that, the guys from the triage area came over
and said, we have this young boy. He's kind of wheezing,
(24:03):
he's turning blue. We don't really know what to do.
Would you come take a look at him. And they
brought me over to this bungalow and this.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Boy was lying on a bed inside with his mother.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
His name was Paul, and he was German. And it
turned out he had a hole in his chest, obviously
from debris, so air was getting into his chest and
basically compressing his lung and I knew I needed a
dressing that would allow air to be pushed out but
(24:36):
not allow air to get in. Of course, we had
just some very rudimentary first aid kits band aids, and
you know that sort of stuff you get in a
first aid kit you have in your car. But amongst
all the people that we put out the word and
we were able to find some things to jury rig
and that was sort of the story of the day,
jury rigging first aid. And we were able to stabilize
(25:01):
Paul and get the air out of his lungs so
that he could breathe better, but obviously it was still
a very very serious injury. From then I started to
do first aid on other people, and then started to
have more and more people to peer once they know
(25:21):
somebody could do first aid. We were on our own
until a foreign nurse showed up who was on vacation
and just happened to be a nurse and started to help,
And very quickly after that a doctor arrived to help,
And so in those early hours I really ended up
doing first aid. But for me it was really it
wasn't so much about helping others. It was a way
(25:44):
not to think about what had been happening that day.
I hadn't even really looked out at the ocean again
until somebody said, oh, there's another wave coming in. I
remember taking a little break and looking out at the
ocean and sort of contemplating how massive this must have been.
We learned that the wave had washed out the main road.
(26:08):
There was no way for us to really escape. The
tsunami was caused by an earthquake measuring nine point three
on the Richter scale off the coast of Bandace in Indonesia.
There were something like two hundred thousand people killed in
Indonesia and Thailand I think was the second most. They
had eight or nine thousand killed and acknowledged before they
(26:32):
really stopped counting, and in a very large percentage of
those were within a few miles of where I was
in Cowlak, So we saw a lot of the destruction
and a lot of the death. There were people from
(26:57):
almost forty countries killed in Thailand in the tsunami. I
couldn't speak Thai, and I had very rudimentary German. Sometimes
we would need a couple of translators just to help
us talk to somebody who was injured. It very quickly
became a realization of like the good in so many people,
(27:21):
despite how injured they were, that they were doing whatever
they could. Those who were not hysterical or not catatonic,
people really did try to step up and help strangers.
(27:43):
It just so happened I was able to get on
the original flight I was scheduled to to return back
to the States just a few days after the tsunami.
Finally I was on this plane with strangers, and I
spent a long time just going through my mind all
the all the injuries, and all the people bowl that
had lost someone, And quickly got overwhelmed with the scale
(28:09):
of it and the loss.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
That I had seen.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
And I think it was only then that I really
started to tell myself that I needed to think about
my own mental health. I probably was going to have
some sort of PTSD trauma response. After I got back,
my injuries to my upper leg and hip started to
(28:41):
become more severe and really limited my mobility, and so
I ended up spending too much time on the internet.
It was really the first, you know, global disaster where
the Internet became a source of aid and assistance in
communication amongst survivor. I would go on these different websites
(29:02):
where people would post messages about people that were missing,
and I did the same and described Caroline, and I
described where I was at. And I would get a
lot of questions from other people who were looking for
someone who was staying at the resort I stayed at,
or who worked at the resort in cow Lock, and
(29:24):
they would send me pictures and asked me if I
had seen them. I had many, many, dozens, if not
one hundred, messages like that. It was really heartbreaking because
I wanted to be honest, but I had seen so
many people, and I would force my brain to sort
of replay a lot of the events to think about
(29:48):
if I had seen this particular face in the group
of people. I did first daid on and that sort
of thing. Meanwhile, Caroline had been doing the same thing,
and she had remembered the name of the dive shop
that I had used, who still had their central computer
somewhere that was not destroyed, and had me in their records,
(30:08):
had my email address, And so it took all those
all those weeks for us to finally reconnect and realized
that we were both alive. Were able to go back
to Thailand about four months after the tsunami and provide
(30:28):
some humanitarian assistance and some underwater assistance. Using our expertise
as scuba divers. We were able to walk around and
pick up a couple pieces of debris that reminded us
of the resort. There was a tree that had managed
(30:50):
to survive that was quite near the ocean that had
a lot of pictures of people who didn't make it.
I think for me finally cemented feeling of how lucky
we were. I got lucky with the mannequin and with
what did hit me and what didn't hit me, and
what I hit and what I didn't hit to make it.
(31:10):
That day, there were a number of pictures of children
who died in that area at Oar Resort, or one
of the ones just immediately next door. That was my
moment of making a commitment to doing things to honor
(31:33):
their memory and their loss. I had some great contacts
and mentors over the years who have given me these
opportunities in a variety of different spheres to give back,
and I gave money to help support a couple of
children who were survivors. I worked with some of my
(31:54):
mapping skills to help create new risk maps for different
areas of the West coast of these and think about
ways that we could urge the government to start to
plan better for tsunamis.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
We have a huge tsunami.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Risk on the West coast, especially off Oregon in Washington,
and I was also helping with shipwrecks and hurricane damage
to coral Coral reefs are some of the most sensitive
organisms to climate change, so it's it's it's going to
be a difficult road for them. But many other animals
(32:29):
and habitats of the natural world that really bring us
a lot of benefits, right, I mean, one of the
things that that that you know, the experts tell us
is core reefs. They help protect us from big waves.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
They give us.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Food and beautiful places to see and and without them,
we either have to build things that at a great
amount of expense to protect our our buildings and things
on shore and hotels and restaurants at a tremendous extra
expense to ourselves. And so I think that's a message.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Welcome back. This is a live again joining me for
a conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive Against
story producers Nicholas Takowski and Brent Die And I'm your host,
Dan Bush. Brent, thank you so much for reaching out
to Dwayne and talking to him. This story resonates with
(33:45):
me specifically because I was there. I was not there
during the tsunami, but I went there with the documentary
crew shortly thereafter. So the tsunami happened right around Christmas
twenty two and four, and we left to document the
situation in on the island of Sumatra near bond Ace
(34:09):
in January. So we were there pretty fresh, freshly after
the incident. And so there are a few things that
I mean, I think I still have some forms of
I guess you could call it PTSD. I noticed some
things that happened when I got back from having stood
at the fresh Mass burials. Twenty thousand people or more
(34:35):
eighty percent of certain towns that we visited were completely gone,
and the people as well, the populations were like down
to twenty percent of what they were, and we interviewed
these people. And then at the time, I was in
the mindset of, you know, I was I was the DPI,
was the cameraman, and I was the sound guy. I
was all of these things in one and so I
(34:56):
was I was so focused on that in the trenches
of doing that and taking you helicopters from place to
place because the roads were, you know, unusable, and collecting
these interviews and documenting what had happened that I wasn't
really I think a part of my brain had shut off.
And I think that's one of the things that we'll
talk about with Dwayne's story, is it didn't hit him
(35:19):
till he was on the plane what he had sort
of just been through. I think. Anyway, Brent, can you
tell us just kind of walk us into the story
and tell us a little bit about why you were
attracted to talking to Dwayne and what I think.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
I think I had the same attraction to the story
that you did. My girlfriend at the time and I
had planned a trip to Southeast Asia to begin in
February of twenty twenty five. So turning on the news
Christmas morning and seeing that one of the worst natural
disasters in history had pretty much wiped out southern Thailand
(35:53):
and a lot of the other countries Bangladesh, even as
far away as the coast of Africa. There was even
effects from the I mean, that's how dramatic this this
event was. So yeah, we went to Thailand right after
this tsunami, my girlfriend and I. Her father had served
in the Vietnam War and was actually killed in ben Wo,
so we went to see where he had served. It
(36:14):
was shocking to get to Bangkok and see just rows
of rows of street dividers lined up with xerox photographs
of victims, missing people from this tsunami that had taken
two hundred and fifty thousand lives out of the entire
impact area. And that's just like as as Dwayne said,
(36:35):
that's that's the number they got to when they were
still counting, and some of these countries quit counting. We
would meet people on hikes who had been there when
the tsunami hit, and they would describe this surreal, slow
moving disaster that was coming at them. You know, the
water recedes and everybody's like fascinated by what's happening. They
got their their inclination is to walk down and look
(36:58):
at the fish flopping around in the sand, and then
the wave comes and knocks everything apart. And what Dwayne
went through is what a lot of people described that
we met. But it was just absolutely horrifying, and to
think that something of this scale could occur in modern times,
I mean, it's biblical. This was the worst natural disaster
recorded in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, or Thailand, and it was
(37:18):
the third most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the world
since modern seismography began in nineteen hundreds and two hundred
and fifty thousand people were killed in fourteen countries in
Southeast Asia, India, and Africa, and the fault line was
a rupture of seven hundred and eighty miles and it
was the longest duration of faulting ever observed, So the
(37:41):
time it was rumbling was ten minutes. Remotely triggered earthquakes
as far away as Alaska, and the height of the
teutonic plate shift was fifty feet, So the earth shifted
fifty feet out there in the ocean to start.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
All this from happening.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Jesus, it's a shocking event. So I was really excited
to talk to somebody who'd been there personally, and to
talk to somebody with Dwayne's presence of mind through the
whole thing. He's a very measured person, a very thoughtful person,
as you can hear, and just in the way he
delivers information, I can see how he kept his wits
(38:24):
about him through all of this and was able to
calm people down in the most extreme situations. I mean,
I can't imagine if my children had been washed out
to see or if my wife was missing. I don't
know how I'd be able to listen to somebody like
Dwayne to say, let's get to higher ground, let's get
to safety. But he was able to do that, and
I just think it's.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
An amazing case of.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
How people can come together in these extreme events and
how different personalities really lend themselves to these situations.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
There were two things that sort of struck me listening
to his story profoundly. One is what you just said,
Brent and Nick, you might be able to speak to
this too. Is this. We hear these stories of these
people who find this resilience in the moments of crisis,
and I don't know if it's everybody. You know, I
(39:21):
don't know if certain unspoken political leaders would find bundance,
would find such resilience. But there's something that kicks in
and I don't know it's for everybody. But and it
might have been because Dwayne did not have any immediate
family that he was you know, concerned about that would
have allowed him the space to be able to become
(39:42):
heroic and beaten into But after having survived this, I
don't know how many hours did he say how many
hours he was sort of wrestling with the first wave.
Speaker 4 (39:51):
You know, it's funny because he describes these things and
as sounds as if he's talking about something that might
have taken may have taken three or four hours, and
he's like, so thirty minutes later, you know, I'm at
the shore and I'm like, wow, it happened so fast.
And I think what's interesting in that is how his
sense of time was scaled to the moment as well,
(40:12):
like he's going through this and he said it says,
if you know, when he was tumbling in that first
wave where he was tumbling like a rag doll, he said.
In the water, he said he felt like he was
communing with his family back home. He was saying goodbye
to people, he was reviewing his entire life. He was
very calm, and he said it felt like that went
on for minutes. But knowing how long he can hold
(40:34):
his breath, especially in an extreme situation like that, it
couldn't have been more than ninety seconds at his top
capacity to hold his breath, but he said it's probably
more like thirty seconds that he was under but it
felt like forever to him.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
If you've ever had to fight any strong currents, you
know that within a minute or two you're worn out.
So what struck me was this after having battled and
you know, even just using your abdomen muscles to keep
you afloat, or to keep your knees up, or whatever
you have to do to stay in a certain position
so you're not getting completely destroyed by the debris. And
(41:09):
other than the luck, he talked about just the luck
of certain things hitting him and other things not hitting him.
To battle NonStop with every muscle in your body, to
swim for an hour against these extremely massive, you know.
I mean, water is heavy and it's unstoppable, and it's
(41:29):
just this this force that you know, you can't really
reckon with. But to survive that and then to be
able to after a moment of catching his breath, find
somewhere within him, within him the energy to start working
first aid for other people, like without a thought, I
just think that there's something I didn't I always I'm
(41:51):
fascinated by that that's even possible, because it seems like
after if you go in a wrestling match with somebody
for five minutes, you're done for the day, if not
a week, right, So but for him to just kind
of be able to put that aside and to get
up and continue to work, and it's something that I see.
That's the superpower in humans that happens in these situations
(42:12):
and it's stunning to me that we have that capacity.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Well, not to mention, you know that this was an
event where it felt as if okay, we were done,
and then another wave comes or another you know, he
describes even making it out of that first that first
submersion and thinking okay, I'm oh wow, miraculously I'm on
top of the water. I survived and then now he
(42:36):
has to deal with all the debris hitting him and
this being pulled further out to sea, and then you know,
he gets to the shore and he thinks he's done,
and then he's he can tell by the water level
that another wave's coming, and he's just like, I just
didn't think I could do any more of this. This
was a constant, a rage. You know, there was no
(42:57):
you do the event and then you rest. It was constant.
Speaker 5 (42:59):
I think probably one of the things that makes that
story so terrifying. It's not just the fact that the
you know, nature is so relentless, acts so relentlessly, and
the fragility of you know, life itself in the face
of that, but also that it is that like that
moment when he gets to the shore and he's breathing
(43:21):
and he you know, and he can see that the
water level is you know, showing too much of the
like or that too much of the algae on the rocks,
and I think the most terrifying thing for me in
that moment is this idea that it's like, as long
as it's going, your body is going to stay. You're
going to stay in this high alert moment, and the
(43:42):
second you have like a moments of rest and look
around you and take a moment to actually absorb it,
you understand the full horror. And like him talking about
that moment just like just sort of despairing for a
moment before getting up and like, you know, try to
get where he needed to go. I think that like
(44:03):
having that moment to breathe was probably probably made the
whole experience actually a little bit more horrifying for him
because suddenly he could take it in and he wasn't
just looking at the problem immediately in front of him.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Right, you know.
Speaker 5 (44:20):
I think that, like I think that the sort of
sudden realization of one's own sort of misery in that
moment is probably mentally intensely taxing for him To be
able to just like keep plowing forward as really impressive.
Speaker 4 (44:43):
He had no idea. He knew how bad it was
in colloc where he was staying, but he had no
idea that this tsunami was so huge because they had
no power, they had no communication with the outside world,
so it was a shock to him. I don't even
know if when he got on the plane to go home,
if he knew how huge this thing was.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Did Dwayne get into any like, what's it been twenty years,
so it's been two decades. Does he still suffer from
any sort of PTSD or has he been able to
sort of translate that into efforts to, you know, help
other people or.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
He said the way that he's dealt with his post
traumatic stress is by being active in helping educate different
coastal communities on the threat of tsunamis. He's been to Oregon,
he's been to Hawaii, He's gone back to Thailand to help.
He helped with the recovery efforts, and he met Caroline,
(45:42):
the German woman that he had met while he was there,
and they worked together. They were able to kind of,
through that return visit get some sense of closure.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
This reminds me of another one of your stories, Brent,
where I think it was Cliff but where he talks
about the eleven Pentagon tragedy. How when you're in the
thick of that and doing everything you can to survive
and help others to survive, you don't let tell your
guard you're obviously fighting and you're doing something, so you
(46:12):
keep moving forward and keep moving forward, and then finally
when you get a moment to rest or, you take
a shower or get on a plane and it hits
you all of a sudden, you know what you've been through.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
I think another thing that stuck out for me in
this story was the small kindnesses that went a long way.
Like he said, when they were making their way up
to the hillside, they passed through the part of the
town that wasn't hit. And I think this is another
remarkable thing as you think of the entire town being devastated.
When he said, the man working there was like pointing
at his head, like you need a hat, and he
(46:47):
gave him a hat. And he said, those little moments
of kindness really went a long way. And you see
him talking about how everybody had something they could give,
whether it was translating language for some, whether it was
understanding how to set up a communication system to get
word throughout the camp, what was going on, helping find people.
(47:08):
It gives me a lot of hope. Actually this story
for how people come together to help each.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Other, that's great. That's nicely put Brent. Next week on
the Live Again, we meet artist Angeline Pass who, after
suffering an almost fatal brain aneurysm, discovered a new relationship
with her work and her life.
Speaker 6 (47:29):
I had collapsed on the floor. I don't even remember
the pain in my head at that point. I just
remember everything getting dark. I was like, oh my god,
I'm dying, Like my body knew. I want to keep
seeing beautiful things.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
I want to.
Speaker 6 (47:46):
Eat and drink and travel. It doesn't have to be
Italy or you know, Europe. It can be your backyard even.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Keith Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovett, 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 L. K Ali
and Nomes Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhardt Slovitchka,
(48:22):
Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Special thanks to
Dwayne Meadows for sharing his incredible story of survival and hope.
His story and the T shirt he wore on that
fateful day are displayed at the Pacific Sunami Museum. Thank you,
Dwayne for inspiring us with your bravery and your commitment
to making a difference. Alive Again is a production of
(48:45):
I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a
transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear
your story. Please email us at Alive Again Project at
gmail dot com. That's a l I ve 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 (00:14):
My name is Dwayne Meadows. On the day after Christmas
in two thousand and four, I survive one of the
world's worst natural disasters. To this day, what gets me
through thinking about it is thinking about all of the
helpful things that people did in the face of this
(00:36):
immense disaster. There was so much help that made things
even just a little bit better for everyone.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
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 exp periences and more broadly, brushes
with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share
(01:06):
these stories to 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 (01:20):
I grew up in rural Ohio, but I was a
swimmer and I always love the water. Early on, as
a child, I wanted to learn how to scuba dive,
and so I was able to get certified at the
age of fifteen. I had lots of little farm ponds
and lakes around me, very small, and I would go
(01:40):
and grab my gear and ask the ask the owners
if I could just scuba dive and see what was
in their lakes. That kept me occupied as a teenager.
From there, I decided I would go to college to
learn how to be a marine biologist. It turned out
to be something that was really interesting and people were
(02:03):
willing to pay me to go to interesting places to
look at interesting animals.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I had the.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Opportunity to go visit a college friend who was from
and lived and worked in Thailand, and I got there
on Christmas Day in the afternoon, so it was a holiday.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
People were celebrating and.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Taking the time off, and I met a young German woman, Caroline,
who was looking for the same resort that I was
staying at, and we ended up talking about scuba diving.
We decided to meet in the morning and maybe go
snorkeling on the nice beaches that they had there. It
(02:48):
was a lovely, beautiful sunny day, and after we finished
our breakfast, we both decided we needed to go back
to our rooms, but we agreed to meet in just
fifteen minutes and unfortunately, that's when everything really started.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
I was back in.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
My bungalow, a little two room building right on the beach,
looking out on the sea.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
It was gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I started to throw laundry into a big backpack, and
I heard a scream, and then I looked out to
the ocean and I saw some distance out, now, maybe
a mile or something, this white line far out in
the ocean.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
That looked like some kind of small wave.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I knew it was a tsunami, but I thought, oh,
this is just a tiny, little little wave out in
the distance, and I thought I was going to be safe.
My bungalow was kind of up off the sand. It
was on a slope, and there were maybe five or
six steps up to the actual level of my room,
so I figured I was a little bit above the
(04:00):
water level. Just to be safe. I thought, Oh, I'm
gonna take my clothes and throw this backpack up on
top of this armor furniture, and it's all gonna be good.
Maybe I'm gonna get my feet wet, but this kind
of little wave might wash through and it's no big deal.
(04:21):
So I wasn't really scared at that point, but very
quickly that started to change. The next thing I remember,
the water just comes gushing into my room and almost
immediately fills it up. There was no time to get out,
and I just kind of remember bracing myself and thinking
(04:46):
I could hold on and ride it out and see
what happened, or this building is just going to be
a death trap. Everything just exploded as the wave came in,
and I found myself underwater, just spinning and twisting and
completely disoriented and not knowing what way was up and
(05:09):
whether I could really survive just the force of the water.
I convince myself, I need to just calm down. My
air supply will last longer if I lower my heartbeat.
(05:29):
This is what we learn when we're diving and snarkling.
I was tossing and turning, and I could feel myself
flipping around just like a.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
You know, rag dollar whatever they say.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I was thinking I would swim up, but I had
no idea which direction was actually up. I still felt
myself twisting and turning, so I felt very helpless. The
reality of the fact that I was not maybe gonna
(06:20):
be able to make it out of this started to
settle in. I remember very distinctly saying goodbye to my
son who was like six years old at that point
and wasn't with me on this day.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
He was still back home with his mother.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
We were divorced, and thinking about my other family members
and my parents were still alive. Time just seemed to expand.
I don't know how long it lasted, but there were
so many visions of my life during that time, and
(07:00):
I felt like that's what I was really seeing in
front of me. As I was still in this dark,
dark water, kind of just felt myself almost giving up
to these thoughts and not really thinking about how to swim.
(07:21):
With my training, I had been able to hold my
breath for three or four minutes underwater. I'm guessing with
all the stress and adrenaline and everything of this, it
was probably more like a minute.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
And a half.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Out of nowhere, I ended up popping up to the
surface of the water, you know. I remember that feeling
of relief and almost euphoria surviving this thing like quickly
changed to another sense of Oh my god, this is horrible.
(08:00):
The water was moving incredibly fast, like a whitewater rafting trip,
and very quickly I was feeling lots of stuff hitting me,
and as I start to look around, I can see
debris everywhere now, and I mean cars floating in the water, bungalows,
(08:21):
whole bungalows floating, and trees and wood with nails. And
they used a lot of propane tanks, I think for
heating or cooling your refrigerators and whatever, and some of
those were spewing gas and you could hear the hissing
sound everywhere in the background, so it was very loud
(08:42):
and still like crunching of debris, and the debris was
coming into like big piles that were many, many feet high,
so you couldn't see very far even if you really
wanted to, because the piles were starting to come together,
and the buildings were breaking up, and the metal was
(09:03):
creaking like all these different sounds on top of screams.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
I heard lots of people.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
In the water screaming, but I never saw any for
the longest time, because there was so much debris between us,
and even the water itself was quite big, waves especially
and just mud. The water was so full of mud.
It was so chaotic with so many things in the
(09:32):
water that I felt that I could only like look
ahead of me and try to block things with my
hands from hitting my face and my chest, and kind
of my vital organs.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Was so rapid fire that like.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
You couldn't really like look ahead of you and see something,
even if it was thirty feet in front of you.
You know, I really started to get in a little
panicked at all of the things that were hitting me
and just not being able to really relax at all.
And I remember something pulling me under and realizing that
(10:12):
I was barely above water and I had like strap
on Tiva sandals, and something had gotten between my heel
and the sandal and was pulling me under.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
It was heavy.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
I have no idea what it was, but I reached
down take my sandal off, and just unconsciously I put
a sandal on my wrist. It just kept going and going.
At some point there, probably a few minutes, I ran
into a palm tree. And I had been noticing that
(10:48):
the water level was basically the tops of palm trees.
And if you've you know, you ever spend any time
at a tropical beach, you know, those things are thirty
forty to fifty feet tall, And it made me realize
just how deep the water was. Clearly I was somewhere
actually over what should have been land as I was
(11:10):
grabbing onto the tree. Basically the water was still hitting
my back. It was coming from behind me, and so
the debris now instead of kind of floating with me,
was hitting me, and sometimes hard, like enough that it
would sort of knock your breath out almost.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
So I just decided to let go and again.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Was floating in this kind of giant river. I finally
found the thing that really I think kind of saved me,
which was.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
A mannequin.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I had the lower half, just the legs and kind
of the waist, and I hugged it close to my
chest and it was helping me stay a little bit
out of water and catch my breath. And we just
cruised along like that. As the water kind of slowed down,
I could finally start to look around me. I realized
(12:14):
I was actually really in the ocean. Now, there there
was ocean. There was the mountains behind me, but nothing
nothing looked familiar. I really had no idea exactly where
I was, and it was sort of hard to look
around at this point. There was so there were big
piles of debris, wood trees, you know, I could see
(12:36):
where the shore was. I wasn't that far out. I
kept the mannequin with me. I had kind of started
to feel my body come down from all the adrenaline,
and I could tell at some point my knee was
hurting and it felt like things had been messed up
in some way.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
I couldn't really tell. I couldn't see in the water.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
But I thought, oh, this man would be a really
nice crutch when I got to shore.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
But I'll keep this.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
And I also remember at some point thinking, this is
like a great momento, and I really wanted to keep it.
And so I was swimming with this mannequin. It was
not a straight line from where I was to the
shore because of all of this debris, and so I
had to swim kind of round about probably half a
(13:28):
mile to get this a quarter mile, and during that
time I could hear people screaming asking for help. I
didn't see any other people except the one person I
saw on a bungalow that I was swimming very nearby.
It was a tie woman, so I could just tell
she was upset and hurt, but she was actually all
(13:52):
the way on the top of a roof, like her
hands hanging over the peak of the roof, so she
was almost completely out of the water. And able to
kind of catch her breath and rest. But she knew
that she, like me, was also far out in the
ocean and needed to get back to shore, and so
(14:14):
I assumed she wanted help, and I swam over to
this floating bungalow and I reached out the mannequin and
she understood what I was saying, and she was willing to.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Give it a try.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
I kind of said, I'm going to go with you
and we'll go into shore. And she came down into
the water and she grabbed onto the mannequin, but she just,
you know, her face was just barely above the water,
and she just freaked out. I don't think she knew
how to swim. She was kicking and screaming, and I
(14:53):
couldn't get her to calm down, and she didn't want
to stay in the water.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I thought I could maybe like tow.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Her in, but at the end she just climbed back
up on the roof and I remember kind of motioning
to her that I would swim in and then come
back out to get her, and I meant it.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
At the time. It was silly.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
I had really no idea what things were really like
on shore, but I really meant it, and it haunted
me for a long time afterwards that I wasn't able
to find her again. As I got closer to shore,
(15:39):
I noticed these rocks that were along the coast, very
close to the beach. And the thing that caught my
attention though, was that there were snails and muscleshells and
other marine life that were growing on this rock. But
they were six or seven feet out of the water,
(15:59):
and I knew that that was too high to be natural,
that they were too far above the current water level
that I was swimming in for that to be natural.
So what that told me as a marine biologist was
that the water level was too low. That rock should
have only been two feet out of water, and it
was six feet or seven feet out of water. And
(16:21):
that's how I knew there was another wave coming. I
just thought, I can't do this again. I can't survive
another wave. It was clear from where I was at
that the wave had gone a long way into shore
(16:44):
and that I was nowhere near to the safety that
I had just thought I was at. I swam as
quickly as I could to shore and got out, but
I was very depressed at that point as I started
to walk. I could tell pretty quickly that my leg
was injured, that I was going to be limping. My
(17:05):
hip felt weird. I mean, I had cuts everywhere on
my body. In front of me, there was kind of
a newer resort building, like concrete, unlike most of the
bamboo kind of bungalows that most of us had stayed in.
It was three stories tall, was a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
Of it was just gone. All the windows and glass
and some of the walls were gone, but it was.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Still kind of there, and there was a gap between
that one building and another, and so I started working
my way in that direction. And it was at that
point that I really started to come across other survivors.
Some people were just completely hysterical, screaming for their loved ones,
(17:52):
their children especially, or partners. And I kind of suggested
that maybe we should go up, hopefully the main road
was okay or somewhere where there were more people, like
another wave might be coming. And it's not say.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
We were all alive.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
And while we saw a good share of dead bodies
on the beach, it seemed like a lot of people
had made it. And I remember, you know, using that
logic with people to suggest that you know their loved
ones probably made it. The fact that I came out
of the water very far from where I had started.
(18:45):
When I was talking with people about like where their
loved ones might be and why they weren't in the
same place they were for some people that worked, and
of course for some people they you know, we're just
completely distraught. It was at that point that I realized
I still had my sandal and I was the only
person who had any kind of footwear in our group
(19:06):
of there's probably five or six people at that point,
and I said, Okay, I'm going to put my sandal on,
and I went in front of the group of people
and just kind of shuffled my way through some of
these puddles that we just couldn't avoid, to kind of
make sure we weren't like stepping on anything like really sharp.
There were enormous piles of debris and puddles kind of
(19:28):
just like in the ocean, like I described earlier, and
so we had this crazy little trail of people making
our way through this debris and trying not to hurt
ourselves any worse. We ran across some tie or Burmese
workers that had been working on construction in the area
that were mourning a dead relative that was there. We
(19:53):
were able to convince them to join us in leaving,
and it was like right at that point that somebody
in the group looked back and saw kind of exactly
what we saw the first time, was another white line
on the horizon and the wave coming in. Everybody just
sort of started to scatter and make their way up
(20:15):
the hill as best they could, and we were just
very lucky that for us the second wave turned out
to be not as big as the first one, but
in some places the second wave was bigger than the first.
There was basically one main road and behind it there
was mostly a mountain and a national park with the
(20:38):
forest land, and the main road had additional hotels and
restaurants and shops. Somebody, I think, motioned us over and
had some bottles of water, and there were a few chairs,
and I remember there was a tai Man who was
running a little tourist shop and he stepped out and
(20:59):
he offered me a baseball hat and he pointed to
the sun and it said something in a little bit
of broken English, and you know, convinced me I needed
a hat to protect myself from sunburn. It was just
the smallest things at that point were just so amazingly
helpful and useful. And I was at that point that
(21:24):
a man came by on a motorcycle and said, oh,
there's another wave coming. It's not safe here. You should
go up, and he pointed me up towards this resort
that was up on a hillside. And as I was
going along, I came across this young Swiss girl at
(21:46):
fourteen fifteen something like that. She told me her name,
and she said she was missing her family and siblings,
and she was very distraught and crying and upset. And
I said, oh, come with me, we'll look for your family.
I was, you know, by myself. I was missing Caroline,
this friend I had met the day before, but I
(22:07):
didn't have those family connections that a lot of people.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Were worried about.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
And so she and I walked and we eventually came
up this kind.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Of state dirt road. There was like a hotel.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Check in administration area and a couple of buildings and
then a lot of little bungalows spread out. They sort
of had like a triage area set up, and we're
trying to figure out who had injuries that needed attending
to and I said, well, but I've got some advanced
first aid training which I had gotten through my work.
(22:41):
I could give IVS fluids to people, I could do stitches,
and so I said, give me a couple of minutes
and I'll help you guys out. I need to kind
of catch my breath. I was still really like hyperventilating
and just breathing hard and stressed and coming down from
all this adrenaline, I think, and.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
I did that.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
I took the girl over and we sat in the
shade between a couple of bungalows with a bunch of
other people.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
It was horrible. It was the worst part of the day,
at least after getting out of the water.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Part, because you felt helpless and you were looking at
some people who were still hysterical, crying and screaming, some
of them in pain from injuries, some of them pretty
sure that some family member relative was seriously heard or
had died they maybe have seen something happen. And other
(23:41):
people who were just catatonic, they just weren't moving at all,
just blank stares. I asked somebody else to look after
the Swiss girl, and just as I had sort of
done that, the guys from the triage area came over
and said, we have this young boy. He's kind of wheezing,
(24:03):
he's turning blue. We don't really know what to do.
Would you come take a look at him. And they
brought me over to this bungalow and this.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Boy was lying on a bed inside with his mother.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
His name was Paul, and he was German. And it
turned out he had a hole in his chest, obviously
from debris, so air was getting into his chest and
basically compressing his lung and I knew I needed a
dressing that would allow air to be pushed out but
(24:36):
not allow air to get in. Of course, we had
just some very rudimentary first aid kits band aids, and
you know that sort of stuff you get in a
first aid kit you have in your car. But amongst
all the people that we put out the word and
we were able to find some things to jury rig
and that was sort of the story of the day,
jury rigging first aid. And we were able to stabilize
(25:01):
Paul and get the air out of his lungs so
that he could breathe better, but obviously it was still
a very very serious injury. From then I started to
do first aid on other people, and then started to
have more and more people to peer once they know
(25:21):
somebody could do first aid. We were on our own
until a foreign nurse showed up who was on vacation
and just happened to be a nurse and started to help,
And very quickly after that a doctor arrived to help,
And so in those early hours I really ended up
doing first aid. But for me it was really it
wasn't so much about helping others. It was a way
(25:44):
not to think about what had been happening that day.
I hadn't even really looked out at the ocean again
until somebody said, oh, there's another wave coming in. I
remember taking a little break and looking out at the
ocean and sort of contemplating how massive this must have been.
We learned that the wave had washed out the main road.
(26:08):
There was no way for us to really escape. The
tsunami was caused by an earthquake measuring nine point three
on the Richter scale off the coast of Bandace in Indonesia.
There were something like two hundred thousand people killed in
Indonesia and Thailand I think was the second most. They
had eight or nine thousand killed and acknowledged before they
(26:32):
really stopped counting, and in a very large percentage of
those were within a few miles of where I was
in Cowlak, So we saw a lot of the destruction
and a lot of the death. There were people from
(26:57):
almost forty countries killed in Thailand in the tsunami. I
couldn't speak Thai, and I had very rudimentary German. Sometimes
we would need a couple of translators just to help
us talk to somebody who was injured. It very quickly
became a realization of like the good in so many people,
(27:21):
despite how injured they were, that they were doing whatever
they could. Those who were not hysterical or not catatonic,
people really did try to step up and help strangers.
(27:43):
It just so happened I was able to get on
the original flight I was scheduled to to return back
to the States just a few days after the tsunami.
Finally I was on this plane with strangers, and I
spent a long time just going through my mind all
the all the injuries, and all the people bowl that
had lost someone, And quickly got overwhelmed with the scale
(28:09):
of it and the loss.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
That I had seen.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
And I think it was only then that I really
started to tell myself that I needed to think about
my own mental health. I probably was going to have
some sort of PTSD trauma response. After I got back,
my injuries to my upper leg and hip started to
(28:41):
become more severe and really limited my mobility, and so
I ended up spending too much time on the internet.
It was really the first, you know, global disaster where
the Internet became a source of aid and assistance in
communication amongst survivor. I would go on these different websites
(29:02):
where people would post messages about people that were missing,
and I did the same and described Caroline, and I
described where I was at. And I would get a
lot of questions from other people who were looking for
someone who was staying at the resort I stayed at,
or who worked at the resort in cow Lock, and
(29:24):
they would send me pictures and asked me if I
had seen them. I had many, many, dozens, if not
one hundred, messages like that. It was really heartbreaking because
I wanted to be honest, but I had seen so
many people, and I would force my brain to sort
of replay a lot of the events to think about
(29:48):
if I had seen this particular face in the group
of people. I did first daid on and that sort
of thing. Meanwhile, Caroline had been doing the same thing,
and she had remembered the name of the dive shop
that I had used, who still had their central computer
somewhere that was not destroyed, and had me in their records,
(30:08):
had my email address, And so it took all those
all those weeks for us to finally reconnect and realized
that we were both alive. Were able to go back
to Thailand about four months after the tsunami and provide
(30:28):
some humanitarian assistance and some underwater assistance. Using our expertise
as scuba divers. We were able to walk around and
pick up a couple pieces of debris that reminded us
of the resort. There was a tree that had managed
(30:50):
to survive that was quite near the ocean that had
a lot of pictures of people who didn't make it.
I think for me finally cemented feeling of how lucky
we were. I got lucky with the mannequin and with
what did hit me and what didn't hit me, and
what I hit and what I didn't hit to make it.
(31:10):
That day, there were a number of pictures of children
who died in that area at Oar Resort, or one
of the ones just immediately next door. That was my
moment of making a commitment to doing things to honor
(31:33):
their memory and their loss. I had some great contacts
and mentors over the years who have given me these
opportunities in a variety of different spheres to give back,
and I gave money to help support a couple of
children who were survivors. I worked with some of my
(31:54):
mapping skills to help create new risk maps for different
areas of the West coast of these and think about
ways that we could urge the government to start to
plan better for tsunamis.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
We have a huge tsunami.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Risk on the West coast, especially off Oregon in Washington,
and I was also helping with shipwrecks and hurricane damage
to coral Coral reefs are some of the most sensitive
organisms to climate change, so it's it's it's going to
be a difficult road for them. But many other animals
(32:29):
and habitats of the natural world that really bring us
a lot of benefits, right, I mean, one of the
things that that that you know, the experts tell us
is core reefs. They help protect us from big waves.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
They give us.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Food and beautiful places to see and and without them,
we either have to build things that at a great
amount of expense to protect our our buildings and things
on shore and hotels and restaurants at a tremendous extra
expense to ourselves. And so I think that's a message.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Welcome back. This is a live again joining me for
a conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive Against
story producers Nicholas Takowski and Brent Die And I'm your host,
Dan Bush. Brent, thank you so much for reaching out
to Dwayne and talking to him. This story resonates with
(33:45):
me specifically because I was there. I was not there
during the tsunami, but I went there with the documentary
crew shortly thereafter. So the tsunami happened right around Christmas
twenty two and four, and we left to document the
situation in on the island of Sumatra near bond Ace
(34:09):
in January. So we were there pretty fresh, freshly after
the incident. And so there are a few things that
I mean, I think I still have some forms of
I guess you could call it PTSD. I noticed some
things that happened when I got back from having stood
at the fresh Mass burials. Twenty thousand people or more
(34:35):
eighty percent of certain towns that we visited were completely gone,
and the people as well, the populations were like down
to twenty percent of what they were, and we interviewed
these people. And then at the time, I was in
the mindset of, you know, I was I was the DPI,
was the cameraman, and I was the sound guy. I
was all of these things in one and so I
(34:56):
was I was so focused on that in the trenches
of doing that and taking you helicopters from place to
place because the roads were, you know, unusable, and collecting
these interviews and documenting what had happened that I wasn't
really I think a part of my brain had shut off.
And I think that's one of the things that we'll
talk about with Dwayne's story, is it didn't hit him
(35:19):
till he was on the plane what he had sort
of just been through. I think. Anyway, Brent, can you
tell us just kind of walk us into the story
and tell us a little bit about why you were
attracted to talking to Dwayne and what I think.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
I think I had the same attraction to the story
that you did. My girlfriend at the time and I
had planned a trip to Southeast Asia to begin in
February of twenty twenty five. So turning on the news
Christmas morning and seeing that one of the worst natural
disasters in history had pretty much wiped out southern Thailand
(35:53):
and a lot of the other countries Bangladesh, even as
far away as the coast of Africa. There was even
effects from the I mean, that's how dramatic this this
event was. So yeah, we went to Thailand right after
this tsunami, my girlfriend and I. Her father had served
in the Vietnam War and was actually killed in ben Wo,
so we went to see where he had served. It
(36:14):
was shocking to get to Bangkok and see just rows
of rows of street dividers lined up with xerox photographs
of victims, missing people from this tsunami that had taken
two hundred and fifty thousand lives out of the entire
impact area. And that's just like as as Dwayne said,
(36:35):
that's that's the number they got to when they were
still counting, and some of these countries quit counting. We
would meet people on hikes who had been there when
the tsunami hit, and they would describe this surreal, slow
moving disaster that was coming at them. You know, the
water recedes and everybody's like fascinated by what's happening. They
got their their inclination is to walk down and look
(36:58):
at the fish flopping around in the sand, and then
the wave comes and knocks everything apart. And what Dwayne
went through is what a lot of people described that
we met. But it was just absolutely horrifying, and to
think that something of this scale could occur in modern times,
I mean, it's biblical. This was the worst natural disaster
recorded in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, or Thailand, and it was
(37:18):
the third most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the world
since modern seismography began in nineteen hundreds and two hundred
and fifty thousand people were killed in fourteen countries in
Southeast Asia, India, and Africa, and the fault line was
a rupture of seven hundred and eighty miles and it
was the longest duration of faulting ever observed, So the
(37:41):
time it was rumbling was ten minutes. Remotely triggered earthquakes
as far away as Alaska, and the height of the
teutonic plate shift was fifty feet, So the earth shifted
fifty feet out there in the ocean to start.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
All this from happening.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Jesus, it's a shocking event. So I was really excited
to talk to somebody who'd been there personally, and to
talk to somebody with Dwayne's presence of mind through the
whole thing. He's a very measured person, a very thoughtful person,
as you can hear, and just in the way he
delivers information, I can see how he kept his wits
(38:24):
about him through all of this and was able to
calm people down in the most extreme situations. I mean,
I can't imagine if my children had been washed out
to see or if my wife was missing. I don't
know how I'd be able to listen to somebody like
Dwayne to say, let's get to higher ground, let's get
to safety. But he was able to do that, and
I just think it's.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
An amazing case of.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
How people can come together in these extreme events and
how different personalities really lend themselves to these situations.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
There were two things that sort of struck me listening
to his story profoundly. One is what you just said,
Brent and Nick, you might be able to speak to
this too. Is this. We hear these stories of these
people who find this resilience in the moments of crisis,
and I don't know if it's everybody. You know, I
(39:21):
don't know if certain unspoken political leaders would find bundance,
would find such resilience. But there's something that kicks in
and I don't know it's for everybody. But and it
might have been because Dwayne did not have any immediate
family that he was you know, concerned about that would
have allowed him the space to be able to become
(39:42):
heroic and beaten into But after having survived this, I
don't know how many hours did he say how many
hours he was sort of wrestling with the first wave.
Speaker 4 (39:51):
You know, it's funny because he describes these things and
as sounds as if he's talking about something that might
have taken may have taken three or four hours, and
he's like, so thirty minutes later, you know, I'm at
the shore and I'm like, wow, it happened so fast.
And I think what's interesting in that is how his
sense of time was scaled to the moment as well,
(40:12):
like he's going through this and he said it says,
if you know, when he was tumbling in that first
wave where he was tumbling like a rag doll, he said.
In the water, he said he felt like he was
communing with his family back home. He was saying goodbye
to people, he was reviewing his entire life. He was
very calm, and he said it felt like that went
on for minutes. But knowing how long he can hold
(40:34):
his breath, especially in an extreme situation like that, it
couldn't have been more than ninety seconds at his top
capacity to hold his breath, but he said it's probably
more like thirty seconds that he was under but it
felt like forever to him.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
If you've ever had to fight any strong currents, you
know that within a minute or two you're worn out.
So what struck me was this after having battled and
you know, even just using your abdomen muscles to keep
you afloat, or to keep your knees up, or whatever
you have to do to stay in a certain position
so you're not getting completely destroyed by the debris. And
(41:09):
other than the luck, he talked about just the luck
of certain things hitting him and other things not hitting him.
To battle NonStop with every muscle in your body, to
swim for an hour against these extremely massive, you know.
I mean, water is heavy and it's unstoppable, and it's
(41:29):
just this this force that you know, you can't really
reckon with. But to survive that and then to be
able to after a moment of catching his breath, find
somewhere within him, within him the energy to start working
first aid for other people, like without a thought, I
just think that there's something I didn't I always I'm
(41:51):
fascinated by that that's even possible, because it seems like
after if you go in a wrestling match with somebody
for five minutes, you're done for the day, if not
a week, right, So but for him to just kind
of be able to put that aside and to get
up and continue to work, and it's something that I see.
That's the superpower in humans that happens in these situations
(42:12):
and it's stunning to me that we have that capacity.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Well, not to mention, you know that this was an
event where it felt as if okay, we were done,
and then another wave comes or another you know, he
describes even making it out of that first that first
submersion and thinking okay, I'm oh wow, miraculously I'm on
top of the water. I survived and then now he
(42:36):
has to deal with all the debris hitting him and
this being pulled further out to sea, and then you know,
he gets to the shore and he thinks he's done,
and then he's he can tell by the water level
that another wave's coming, and he's just like, I just
didn't think I could do any more of this. This
was a constant, a rage. You know, there was no
(42:57):
you do the event and then you rest. It was constant.
Speaker 5 (42:59):
I think probably one of the things that makes that
story so terrifying. It's not just the fact that the
you know, nature is so relentless, acts so relentlessly, and
the fragility of you know, life itself in the face
of that, but also that it is that like that
moment when he gets to the shore and he's breathing
(43:21):
and he you know, and he can see that the
water level is you know, showing too much of the
like or that too much of the algae on the rocks,
and I think the most terrifying thing for me in
that moment is this idea that it's like, as long
as it's going, your body is going to stay. You're
going to stay in this high alert moment, and the
(43:42):
second you have like a moments of rest and look
around you and take a moment to actually absorb it,
you understand the full horror. And like him talking about
that moment just like just sort of despairing for a
moment before getting up and like, you know, try to
get where he needed to go. I think that like
(44:03):
having that moment to breathe was probably probably made the
whole experience actually a little bit more horrifying for him
because suddenly he could take it in and he wasn't
just looking at the problem immediately in front of him.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Right, you know.
Speaker 5 (44:20):
I think that, like I think that the sort of
sudden realization of one's own sort of misery in that
moment is probably mentally intensely taxing for him To be
able to just like keep plowing forward as really impressive.
Speaker 4 (44:43):
He had no idea. He knew how bad it was
in colloc where he was staying, but he had no
idea that this tsunami was so huge because they had
no power, they had no communication with the outside world,
so it was a shock to him. I don't even
know if when he got on the plane to go home,
if he knew how huge this thing was.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Did Dwayne get into any like, what's it been twenty years,
so it's been two decades. Does he still suffer from
any sort of PTSD or has he been able to
sort of translate that into efforts to, you know, help
other people or.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
He said the way that he's dealt with his post
traumatic stress is by being active in helping educate different
coastal communities on the threat of tsunamis. He's been to Oregon,
he's been to Hawaii, He's gone back to Thailand to help.
He helped with the recovery efforts, and he met Caroline,
(45:42):
the German woman that he had met while he was there,
and they worked together. They were able to kind of,
through that return visit get some sense of closure.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
This reminds me of another one of your stories, Brent,
where I think it was Cliff but where he talks
about the eleven Pentagon tragedy. How when you're in the
thick of that and doing everything you can to survive
and help others to survive, you don't let tell your
guard you're obviously fighting and you're doing something, so you
(46:12):
keep moving forward and keep moving forward, and then finally
when you get a moment to rest or, you take
a shower or get on a plane and it hits
you all of a sudden, you know what you've been through.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
I think another thing that stuck out for me in
this story was the small kindnesses that went a long way.
Like he said, when they were making their way up
to the hillside, they passed through the part of the
town that wasn't hit. And I think this is another
remarkable thing as you think of the entire town being devastated.
When he said, the man working there was like pointing
at his head, like you need a hat, and he
(46:47):
gave him a hat. And he said, those little moments
of kindness really went a long way. And you see
him talking about how everybody had something they could give,
whether it was translating language for some, whether it was
understanding how to set up a communication system to get
word throughout the camp, what was going on, helping find people.
(47:08):
It gives me a lot of hope. Actually this story
for how people come together to help each.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Other, that's great. That's nicely put Brent. Next week on
the Live Again, we meet artist Angeline Pass who, after
suffering an almost fatal brain aneurysm, discovered a new relationship
with her work and her life.
Speaker 6 (47:29):
I had collapsed on the floor. I don't even remember
the pain in my head at that point. I just
remember everything getting dark. I was like, oh my god,
I'm dying, Like my body knew. I want to keep
seeing beautiful things.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
I want to.
Speaker 6 (47:46):
Eat and drink and travel. It doesn't have to be
Italy or you know, Europe. It can be your backyard even.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Keith Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovett, 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 L. K Ali
and Nomes Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhardt Slovitchka,
(48:22):
Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Special thanks to
Dwayne Meadows for sharing his incredible story of survival and hope.
His story and the T shirt he wore on that
fateful day are displayed at the Pacific Sunami Museum. Thank you,
Dwayne for inspiring us with your bravery and your commitment
to making a difference. Alive Again is a production of
(48:45):
I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a
transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear
your story. Please email us at Alive Again Project at
gmail dot com. That's a l I ve e A
g A I N p R O j E C
T at gmail dot com.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!