Cold Case Files - I SURVIVED: I Saw Half The House Just Collapse

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

Mike attempts to protect his grandparents home as hurricane Sandy hits. When the house starts to collapse around him, Mike tries to swim to safety only to be sucked into the bay by the powerful current. Chris is a crew member on the HMS Bounty when they leave port in hopes of calmer waters during Hurricane Sandy. When the crew are forced to abandon ship, Chris and a handful of others make it on a life raft only to face capsizing in the rough seas. Neza and her extended family try to wait out Hurricane Sandy only to have their home catch fire after power lines start to explode. Progressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. 

Hi, I Survived listeners. I'm Marissa Pinson, and if you're enjoying this show, I just want to remind you that episodes of I Survived, as well as the A&E Classic podcast, Cold Case Files, City Confidential, and American Justice, are all available ad-free on the new A&E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple Plus for just $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. And now, on onto the show. This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. I heard this big noise, and I looked outside the window of the second floor, and I saw half the house just collapse. Real people.

The ship listed all the way over to a 90-degree angle, and we all slid off the deck into the water. Who faced death. I didn't know whether we were going to drown, if we were going to be electrocuted, or if the fire was going to take us. And lived to tell how. I had one last phone call to make.

I called 911, and I got all circuits were busy. At that point, I didn't think I was going to make it. This is I Survived. It's October 2012 in Toms River Township, New Jersey. Mike lives with his grandparents in their house next to the bay. The news was saying that Hurricane Sandy was going to be a super storm. I'd been through a hurricane before, Hurricane Irene, a couple years ago. And that was a mandatory evacuation. So I figured if this wasn't mandatory to leave your house, I was going to be okay. Before the storm hit, my father picked up my grandparents.

They even told me, you should leave, come with us, come up north, be safe, don't be stupid. I thought by being down there, I thought maybe I could save the house. I just didn't want to go into that house, see it all wrecked, and not know how it happened. On Sunday, the day of the storm, Mike was alone in the house. Around 2 p.m., I was just watching the news. Just light winds, nothing major, a little bit of rain, nothing to worry about, really. At 9 p.m., Mike saw water seeping under his front door. You saw the water rising over there over the bulkhead and into that kind of into the house but it was only like a foot of water it was there's really nothing to worry about um we get flooded all the time but usually the water stops at a certain point all I was doing at first was

taking buckets and filling them with water putting it it into the sink. I still had power. I was still watching TV. I was still calm. About 20 minutes later, it got bad. The winds picked up about double. The rain picked up. The waves. Everything. It was a disaster. As the 820-mile-wide hurricane hit land, it created a storm surge 10 feet high. Winds of 80 miles per hour were battering the entire eastern seaboard. Hurricane Sandy was to bring New York City to its knees for over two days.

I tried to put towels underneath the door, bags of sand underneath the door, and the water just pushed them out like they were feathers. I tried to just bring most of the stuff that was downstairs, upstairs, any valuables. I tried to grab anything, flashlights to keep them close because I knew that the power was about to go out. Mike retreated upstairs to escape the rising water. The whole first floor was flooded. I still had the second floor. I was still roaming around. I knew that I had to keep myself calm. All of a sudden, I heard this big noise, and I looked outside the window of the second floor, and I saw half the house just collapse.

Water was rushing into the house, and it was getting higher and higher, and I thought the whole house was going to go. I thought, maybe I should get out of here. I have a better chance of swimming out there than if this house collapsed on me. When I went out the front door, I didn't realize that the water was eight feet in the streets, and it kind of sucked me out. Battling the current, Mike grabbed hold of his car and called his father. I'm hanging on to my windshield wiper on my car.

I can't hold on too much longer. I started screaming, like, Dad, I never should have stayed here. I'm not going to make it. The water's too high. He kept on screaming at me, You got to fight through this. You can't leave me now. And I'm like, Dad, I love you, but there's no way I'm going to make this. Before he knew it, the windshield wiper broke and I got sucked out into the bay. The current was so strong. The more I tried to swim towards land, the more I got knocked out into the bay. I was just freaking out.

I still had my phone in my hand. I don't know how, but it was still working in the water. I had one last phone call to make. I called 911, and I got all circuits were busy. At that point, I didn't think I was gonna make it. The waves were crashing over your head. You're panicking, you're crying, you're screaming for help,

and there's nobody out there to help you. It was just so dark, you couldn't see where land was. The only light I got was when the telephone poles, the generators were blowing up, so you got two seconds of light. I knew in the back of my head that there's nobody going to save you, there's nobody out there but you. If you think you're going to survive, you just got to do it by yourself. At first, I was swimming against the current,

just trying to swim directly straight back to the house, and it just kept on pushing me more and more and more away from it. I didn't know what to do. I'm just treading water, and I remember putting my hands over my face, going underneath the water a little bit, and talking to myself, and telling myself, you got to get it together. Mike realizes he had to stop fighting the current and begin to swim with the waves. The water was so cold.

At first, you're not thinking about it, how the water was cold. I'm trying to swim. I'm trying to tread water, I'm trying to stay alive. But after two hours of being in the water, your body starts to get so weak. You're thinking like, oh my God, I'm gonna die. There's no light and there's so many things in that water, there's so many things just floating around. There's so many things just floating around. And at one point I saw a fin.

I didn't know if it was a dolphin, a shark, anything. I didn't know what it could be. It passed me, and it gave me the motivation and the courage to just keep swimming to land. After swimming for over two hours, Mike made it back to the flooded streets. There's still eight feet of water on land. You can't stand. You're just treading water. You can't see mailboxes. You can't see cars. You can't swim ten feet without bunking into something.

People sigh their houses just in the middle of the water. You have jacuzzis floating from people's backyards. As he tried to swim back to his house, Mike saw a flashlight in the distance. I was trying to scream, like, throw me a rope or something. He couldn't hear me. I couldn't hear him. And after a while, I just tried to ignore him because I knew that there was no way I could reach him. I tried to get back to my house and I kept on swimming and swimming

and it was just not possible. The winds were fierce. I still can't believe how a big object didn't just smack me in the head. I had a duck from everything that was flying over my head. I mean, anything from branches to sticks to people's fences. I didn't want to get sucked back into the current. I didn't want to go back into the bay.

So I just tried to find anything that I could hold on to, and I just couldn't hang on to anything. All I remember was swimming with the current, trying to get anywhere, and this one wave just put me into this white pillar of somebody's house, and I just held on to it as long as I can. Mike pulled himself out of the water onto the raised porch. It's a life-and-death situation. I need to break into this lady's house.

I'm driving this brick into this lady's door, and I had no strength. It had to take me at least 20 to 25 times even to break the door. When the door finally broke, I reached in, I unlocked the door, and I'm just screaming, help, is anybody home? But there was nobody home. Their basement was all flooded, and their first floor wasn't flooded at all. When I went in there, I'm crawling around.

First thing I do is take my clothes off and I saw this white blanket on this couch and I wrapped myself around it. My pulse was slow. My vision was going in and out. I was so clumsy, I was bumping into everything. I knew I had hypothermia at the time. I was freezing.

I was never this cold in my life. I'm trying to feel around for any clothes in the house. I got a pair of jeans, a black jacket, and I put everything on me at once, and I just curled up in a pool. A half hour later, I just, I wasn't, my body wasn't warming up. I was so tired. I thought if I took a nap on the couch that I wouldn't wake up. Believing he was going to die, Mike wrote a note for whoever found his body. I just didn't want them to come home a few days later and see a dead body on the couch and not know how it got there. All I remember is, I guess, me saying, I got swept out of my house, I had to break into yours, it was a life and death situation.

It was a life and death. Please tell my dad I love him. Tell him that I made it here. I didn't think I was going to make it. I didn't know what to do. There was eight feet of water outside the house, and there was no rescue. I remember writing help signs on the window

just in case I did fall asleep. Maybe people would see the help signs. I just prayed. I didn't want to die like this. Mike passed out, but a loud alarm woke him 10 hours later. I went upstairs and saw this carbon monoxide detector.

And, you know, I said to myself, there's no way I'm dying like this. You can't smell carbon monoxide. You only can smell gas. And I was about to leave the house. Before I jumped out, I heard this motor. And I went on the top balcony, and I keep on hearing this wave runner motor, jet ski,

and I'm screaming help. Mike, could somebody help me? Could somebody help me? The man heard Mike's cries for help and came to his rescue. I had no strength. I couldn't even hold on to him on the back of the wave runner. I thought I was just going to fall off. And he wanted to bring me to a shelter at first, but then he saw that I was in bad shape, and we went to his house. He gave me new clothes.

His name was Frank. He lives about a mile from me. And I owe him my life. I called my father up and for some reason he knew it was me. He just picked up the phone and was like, Mike, please tell me it's Mike. Please tell me. My dad, I made it. I'm like, I never thought I was ever going to see you again.

I don't know how I made it, but I made it. I didn't give up. And you're the reason why I didn't give up. I survived Hurricane Sandy because I didn't give up. My adrenaline pushed me through what I had to get through. When you're put in that situation, you do everything you can to survive. Hurricane Sandy caused over $75 billion worth of damage. Over 150 people lost their lives.

If it rains, I get scared now. There's no way I'm going to put myself in that danger anymore. And if someone does, just try to get to safety as quickly as you can. Don't wait until the end where you can't do anything about it. As soon as you see that water drifting up, just get in your car and leave. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Hey, I Survived listeners, whether you love true crime or comedies, celebrity interviews, news, or even motivational speakers, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue, right?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. It's October 2012 in New London, Connecticut. Chris is one of the 18 crew members on board the HMS Bounty. The Bounty was a reproduction of the original Bounty. It was built in 1962 for the film of Mutiny on the Bounty. It was used primarily as a training vessel and also as kind of a floating museum.

My job was the engineer on the ship, responsible for keeping the generators and the propulsion engines going, water systems, electrical systems, and to keep the ship running. The crew was preparing to sail down the East Coast to Florida. The captain called a meeting to discuss the impending hurricane. His thoughts were that the ship would be in more danger sitting at dock if the hurricane

happened to hit where we were than to be at sea. His thoughts were to go out east, southeast, and to see what the path the hurricane was going to take and stay out of the path of its most destructive forces. The Navy generally takes their ships out of port when hurricanes are coming, and so that made sense to me. The captain told us that he wouldn't feel badly about any of us if we decided to get off the ship. Everybody had a sense of confidence in the ship and the captain and their fellow mates. And

so none of us elected to get off the ship at that point. The ship set sail four days before the hurricane was due to hit shore. The seas were pretty good for the first first two days. We were not only under sail, we were also under propulsion from our two main engines. We were trying to make time to get around this hurricane. We started preparing the ship. Anything that seemed like it could move, if it wasn't already lashed once, it was relashed again. We started to hit the storm force on Saturday. The seas picked up dramatically.

The wind was probably blowing 70 knots. The seas were probably running 20, 25 feet. You couldn't walk anywhere without holding onto something. I went flying at least twice across the deck. It was getting pretty hairy at that point in time. In the engine room where I was trying to keep things going, it was extremely hot, well over 100 degrees down there. I was becoming very much dehydrated.

Between the heat and lack of sleep, I probably hadn't slept at that point in time in probably a day and a half. And it is quite an ordeal just to hold on down there, much less trying to work on anything. Two large pumps powered by generators removed any water the ship took on board. I never really started to have any worries until Sunday. We were having to switch the generators back and

forth in order to change filters. And I'd shut one of the generators down. We had a backup hydraulic pump, bilge pump, that ran off one of the main engines. We had taken that and put that down in the hole. And so we were pumping with two pumps. A fuel leak caused one of the engines to fail, leaving only one pump working. I think we were probably taking on water later on that evening, probably at a rate about a foot, two feet an hour, more than we were pumping out. It was obvious that we were getting in pretty serious trouble. I know that the Coast Guard had been contacted.

The concerns were twofold. One of them was our safety. The other one was saving the ship, which everybody very much wanted to do. What we were going to try to do was to hold on to the ship until morning, and they were going to try to bring us some pumps so we could pump the ship out. Below decks, water levels continued to rise at over two feet per hour. The engine room became entirely flooded, and we lost all power. We might have to abandon ship.

We might not be able to save her. We might not be able to stay on her until morning. The decision was made that we should don our emergency suits, our immersion suits, and then we were ordered up on the main deck. We were in the full blunt of this hurricane. I'm going to say it was blowing 70 to 80 knots easily. At midnight, with the ship slowly sinking, the captain decided to abandon ship. The ship was listed very heavily.

And so we were all up holding on to something. The plans were that we were going to do a controlled descent into the life rafts. Before we had a chance to do this controlled descent, the ship heeled over violently to the starboard side. We were all on the port side, and we all went sliding off the deck of the ship in an instant. You didn't have any choice. You were going in the water. And that's when things started to get very scary. This is in the middle of the night, in the middle of a hurricane.

It is raining, the wind's blowing, and you're in these confused 25-foot seas, 30-foot seas. And I look up when I hit the water, and what do I see but coming right down at me? These tremendous masks and all the rigging that are in them is lifting up out of the water and coming slamming right back down at you. My thoughts were to get away from the ship just as fast as I could. It became a matter of survival. I was hung up in the rigging three or four times, but I finally managed to get away, far enough away from the ship so that I wasn't in

danger of being hit by these masks anymore. Despite the darkness and 30-foot waves, Chris found five of his crewmates. We grabbed hold of a piece of thick oak crating that came off the stern of the ship. One of the five crewmates that was with me had been injured pretty severely. He had a couple of crushed vertebrae, several broken ribs, and a dislocated shoulder. And so we were trying to make sure he was okay and trying to keep him with us as well. If any of us had become separated, that would have been it. There was no way you could have swam or gotten back to where you started from with the way the seas and the winds were blowing. It was just one of those, am I going to make it?

Is this the end of it for me? One of my mates had said, well, we need to find one of those life rafts. And it wasn't too much longer after that that lo and behold, what do we see? But it was one of the life rafts. It was still in this canister. They are stored in these big white canisters.

And for some reason, this thing had not deployed. It's deployed by a small explosion, explosive device. And so you didn't want it so close that somebody would get injured by it. I managed to get the life raft deployed. That was only half the battle. In these raging seas and in this wind, getting inside the life raft itself

turned out to be quite a challenge. The entry side that we were trying to get into was probably a foot and a half, two feet off the water. These seas were just pounding, pounding the hell out of us. We're all trying to hold on to this life raft. We're also all physically exhausted. None of us had any sleep. out of us. We're all trying to hold on to this life raft. We're also all physically exhausted. None of us had any sleep. All of us had been beat to death. And the winds were howling. It took a long time,

but we finally managed to get that one person in the life raft. And then after that, it really helped because you had somebody that was inside helping to pull the other people up. Once we got inside the life raft, the ordeal didn't end there. The large waves were probably hitting the life raft probably every five minutes. We came close to being flipped over. That was pretty scary too. What do you do in an upside

down life raft? These life rafts were built for 24, 25 people and there was only six of us in it and we were concerned about the life raft getting flipped over. Every time one of those waves hit, we would get a little bit more water in the life raft and I'm not sure that that didn't actually help us because it helped us to a little weight in the bottom of us to keep us from being flipped over. One of the shipmates I had on board with us, she had one of the EPIRBs with us. And an EPIRB is a signaling device that relays our location to the satellite. And the Coast Guard, therefore, would know where we were.

For over six hours, Chris and his friends were thrown around in the life raft. About an hour after daybreak, the helicopter, we heard it. And it was really a good feeling. There's a canopy over top of this life raft with two openings on it. And I stuck my head out and wanted them to make visual contact with them to let them know that we were down there. And they got close enough and you could see that they were deploying one of the rescue swimmers. He made it over to the life raft and he told us, hey, my name's Dan. I hear you

guys need a ride. And what we wanted to do was to take one at a time and he would swim us over and put us in a basket and they would lift us up into the helicopter. The first person they took was our injured mate, since he was in the worst condition. So they took him over, and Dan proceeded to come back and gather us one at a time. There was three people that he'd gotten out of life raft when a huge wave came and hit the raft and flipped the raft upside down. I didn't know exactly what to do.

Who'd ever been in a situation like that before? What is the next step I'm going to take? And, you know, how do I get away from this? I don't know how we got underneath that life raft through the opening and out on the other side. I think we were just all running on adrenaline. The Coast Guard swimmer, Dan, returned to rescue Chris and his friends.

Besides the six of us, we had no idea if everybody else was safe. We just didn't know. They explained to us there were some other people in the life raft that they had not picked up, and they wanted to go see if they couldn't go get them too. They deployed Dan again down into the raging seas, and it was a cheer that went out every time we saw a new face because it was somebody we knew somebody else was safe it ended up being i think a total of nine of us survivors in this helicopter we still didn't realize on the flight back who had made it and who hadn't and we didn't know until we got to eliz that we were missing the captain and Claudine Christian. The body of crew member Claudine Christian was found the following day.

She drowned. And there was also some bruises on her head. And I'm assuming that she got hit by some of this rigging that I was dodging out there. The body of the captain, Robin Walbridge, was never recovered. I think that the reason that I survived this ordeal was because of everybody else. If it wouldn't have been for all of us working together,

a lot more of us would have been lost. And I think that's the reason that I'm here today. Join me on my new podcast called Connect with Jonathan Mark. You know, for years and years, I've really put myself out there to help people, whether it's celebrity, law enforcement, or everyday people like myself. Join me each week as I bring on literally all my celebrity friends. We will be talking about our lives, maybe spiritual things that have happened to them. But the coolest part is I'll be doing readings for them where you can actually hear real intimate true moments between them and I when I connect to their loved ones. I promise you that this is the podcast for you. Listen to my new podcast, Connect with Jonathan Mark. Follow, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. It's October 2012 in Staten Island, New York. In my home, we are about eight people. And it's my brother, his wife, his two children,

myself, my husband, my mother, and my daughter. We had heard that Hurricane Sandy was coming, and quite frankly, to move eight people to one location was a little bit difficult. So we decided to wait and see. Neza evacuated in 2011 for Hurricane Irene, and their house was badly damaged. So her family decided to stay and protect their home during Hurricane Sandy. We had the generator, we had the sump pumps ready, we had food, we had flashlights, candles, we had everything we needed, and most importantly, we had each other. We had some comfort level knowing that we are not the only ones on the block. Everyone was there. So we figured, what can really happen? You know, if they're not panicked, we're not panicked.

The morning of the hurricane, the eight of us are at home, and we are just watching the news, and we're just kind of downplaying it, thinking, oh, she usually over-exaggerates. It'll be okay. It'll be okay. We look out the window, we walk outside, and the wind is fine. There's no rain inside. There was a little bit of sunshine, actually.

At 6.30 p.m., Nez's sister-in-law suddenly raced downstairs. She says to us, the water's coming. There's water outside. And we didn't understand it because I look out the window and there's no water coming from the sky. Where's this water coming from? I went upstairs to the third floor and looked out the window when I saw our neighbor's boat floating past our driveway and headed up the block. I hear my brother from downstairs screaming like he's never screamed before, and he's a pretty calm person. Everybody out of the house now! My brother was screaming for us to get out of the house, get out, get out now, get out now. And when I

ran down the stairs from the third floor, I just didn't understand, what are you talking about, until I looked at his feet. The water was already at that level, so that meant that the water was at least four feet high at this point. The water is rising so rapidly, you're putting two and two together. It's not coming from the sky, it's coming from the ocean. The rapid flooding was a result of the hurricane combined with an unusually high tide. For something like that to happen so rapidly, you don't know how much time you have till your whole home is submerged. We all just frantically, frantically searching for our rain boots, searching for our coats and putting it on the girls. My brother and my husband are telling

us to get to the car, get to the car. They'd parked the car earlier in the day up the block, further up the block, figuring it was at a little bit of a higher elevation, maybe the cars won't get flooded. I'm wading through this water with my daughter in my arms trying to get to the car when I look up and the power lines above me are just sparking and I just stopped. And I thought to myself, oh my god, this is how we're going to die. We're going to get electrocuted. What do I do? Do I move forward? Do I go back? You don't know what to do in that moment. You just don't. And I just snapped out of it and I said, keep going, keep going. And I just made my way to the car.

We get into the car and I am screaming to my sister-in-law, go, go, just go, drive, just drive, hit the gas, just go. She was looking straight ahead and she just said, Naz, I can't go. The street was full of people trying to drive to safety. There was a line of cars just stopped, stopped, and the water was just rushing up. I said, back to the house, everyone, back to the house, because at this point the water was reaching

the door of the car. I didn't want to remain in a car with power lines blowing up around us and, God forbid, getting electrocuted. And I was screaming at them, everybody back, everybody back, everybody back. As they waded back to the house, they passed their boat parked in the driveway. I noticed that there were life preservers there and for some reason I just grabbed three of them and I ran up and we brought everybody up to the third floor and I started to put them on the girls.

I had just gotten the life preserver on the girls and then on myself when my brother screamed, the house is on fire. And I said, what do you mean? And that's when I heard the explosion and I saw what looked like fireworks out the window. The electric lines had caught fire to our home, and basically one whole side of our home was exploding. And here I have my child asking me if she's going to die, and I have to lie to her and tell her, no, baby,

we're going to be OK. I didn't know whether we were going to drown, if we were going to be electrocuted, or if the fire was going to take us. The first floor is now submerged. Is it going to reach the second floor? We don't know. We're on the third floor at this point.

And now there's a fire. A fire is happening. It's erupting. It's exploding. And I'm thinking, no, no, this is not. It can't be. This cannot be it. And I just screamed out to God, God, please help us. Help us now. Help us now.

And that's when it happened within moments. My brother said, the fire's out, the fire's out. I felt this immense need to get out of this house. To me, it was a death trap. There was one explosion, one fire already. What was next? The gas line was going to explode? When my brother sent everyone out, we said, how and where? And he screamed for our neighbor next door, and she opened her door. She was screaming for us, come, hurry, hurry, hurry. And the look of fear on her face, I'll never forget. A raging torrent flowed between the houses. When you look out onto this water, it's dark, it's dingy. There are things floating by at a rapid pace.

The current is, is, is, is fierceful. It's, it's forceful. The family's boat was still secure on its trailer in the driveway. That boat acted as a bridge that we were able to leave from our home onto this boat and climb onto our neighbor's stairwell. Water was rushing in through the neighbor's open door. The water that was rushing in was now rushing into her downstairs basement. I'm at the doorway trying to help everyone in, and somehow I lost my footing. The current then took me, and it swept me off my feet, and the current was pulling me down to her basement.

If I didn't have that life preserver on, I don't know what would have happened, because that life preserver gave me that moment that I needed to grab onto her banister. And I held on, and while everyone is screaming my name, and they just pulled me right back up. If I did not have that life preserver on, I would have went down into that basement. And there was no getting me out. That's how forceful the current was. Neza and her family retreated upstairs as the water continued to rise. I asked my brother, how much higher is this water going to get?

And he said, no, it's not going to get much higher. We're fine. It's almost over. High tide is almost over. Throughout the night, there were power lines were just sparking everywhere. And you can see the gasoline and the water glistening. So my fear at that point was, my God, there's going to be a mass fire on this island.

I couldn't sleep. I needed to wait for help. I needed to constantly try to call 911, and it just didn't work. No one was coming. My mother and I had waited up the whole night, and waiting by the window with a lantern, with a battery-operated lantern. Our fences that were six feet high in our yard were completely submerged, and so we kept an eye on that. And once we can see the tip of the fences,

we knew that the water was now subsiding, and that was a relief. I took my daughter's life preserver off, and I laid her on the sofa, and I told her, go ahead and go to sleep. The next morning, the water had receded enough for them to escape. So we made it out. We just waded our way out into more the knee-deep of water,

and we just got wet again and went over to the car, the one car that was remaining, and we drove away. As we're driving away, I remember thinking, I never want to go back to that house again. I never want to see that house again. But we had to do what we had to do. We have a mortgage. I have a child. We have nowhere else to go. What am I supposed to do? Hurricane Sandy left over 30,000 people homeless.

I survived because of my family, because of my neighbor, and because of my brother's quick thinking. If there is another hurricane or any other kind of warning, without a doubt, we'll be right back. Patrick is me. Oh, Forrest Gump, come on. Criminal Minds, solving crime after bedtime. Whatever you love to watch, Pluto TV makes it easy with thousands of free movies and shows. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.