SURVIVORS

1. David Crossland, 50, was on holiday with his wife, Louise, in the Bahamas when the giant Hurricane Floyd hit New Providence Island.

‘We were on holiday on Province Island last year when Hurricane George was due to hit, but it changed direction, so this year, when Hurricane Floyd was heading toward us, Louise and I were convinced it would change course. However, a week into our holiday, the hurricane hit the island. All of the ground-floor windows and balcony doors in the hotel were boarded up. At one point, I tried to open the balcony doors in our bedroom to catch a glimpse of the hurricane, but the winds were so strong that I couldn’t move them. All we could do was lie in our bed in the candlelight and wait. When the all-clear was given at 2 p.m., we were able to go out and see the damage. There were parts of houses, broken trees and other debris everywhere, and a tidal wave had destroyed many homes on the island.’

2. When Pat Beddows reached 40, she set herself a mountainous challenge in the Himalayas. During the trek, disaster struck.

‘I set off in a group of 20 from Gangorti, a village at 4,000 metres in the foothills of the Himalayas. As we sat to have lunch, we watched huge chunks of ice break away from a glacier and then fall into the water. Unaware of the risk we were taking, we climbed down into the glacier to take a closer look. Suddenly, I heard a thundering noise and our guide started screaming, “Run! Run! Climb up!” A tidal wave of water and ice was heading straight for us. Luckily, we managed to climb up the rocky slopes. Chunks of ice the size of a car were being thrown into the air barely five metres away. If the guide hadn’t shouted at us to get out of the way, we would have died. When we got to camp, we were told that three years earlier, 16 people had died there in a similar incident. I realised how lucky we all were and burst into tears.’

3. Doug Glenwright, 33, was sitting in his front room in Birmingham, England, when he had the shock of his life.

‘Last week, we were watching on television how tornadoes wrecked Oklahoma, a place where you’d expect to see them. Then suddenly, last night one of them came down our street. The first I became aware of it was when I saw a dustbin bag come up from the ground and fly past my window like a kite. Then branches of trees and all sorts of other debris were pulled up into the air. Telephone lines were knocked down by the hurricane-force winds, and the heavy rain caused four feet of flood water in some people’s kitchens. Naturally, my wife and I were both nervous, but we couldn’t let the children see us like that, so we laughed and joked our way through it. We didn’t think it was very funny, though, when we saw the 3 massive holes it had made in our roof.’