Person Facts About Survival

Two boys were caught in a riptide off Panama City Beach, Florida. Their mother, grandmother, and several strangers swam out to help and got trapped too - nine people in total. A man on the beach remembered how ants link their bodies to rescue their young. He started grabbing strangers' hands. 80 people formed a human chain into the Gulf of Mexico and held it for over an hour. Everyone survived.

Five train cars passed over Wesley Autrey while he shielded a stranger on the subway tracks. His two daughters, ages 4 and 6, watched from the platform. From under the train he shouted: "Let my daughters know their father's okay."

Harrison Okene was the ship's cook on the Jascon-4 when it capsized in 30 meters of water off Nigeria's coast in May 2013. All 11 of his crewmates died. He survived 60 hours alone in a 4-foot air pocket - in total darkness, in freezing water - before rescue divers arrived to collect bodies. When a diver swam through the flooded cabin with a headlamp, a hand reached out and grabbed him. Okene was alive.

In 1971, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke's plane broke apart at 10,000 feet over the Amazon. She fell still strapped to her seat. Broken collarbone. Maggots in her wounds. She remembered one thing her father taught her: follow water downstream. She walked for 11 days and found a lumberjack camp. She was the sole survivor of 92.

A sperm whale rammed and sank a British couple's yacht in the Pacific. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey escaped into a rubber raft with almost nothing. They survived 117 days - catching fish with their bare hands, fighting off sharks, and drinking rainwater. A Korean fishing vessel found them 1,500 miles from where they went down.

When a speeding GMC truck crashed through a bridge fence and plunged upside down into Utah's Jordan River in 2014, Leo Montoya Jr. was the first person to jump in - then shouted at frozen bystanders until more than a dozen strangers waded in beside him. Together they physically flipped the submerged vehicle upright, held one boy's head above water, and got all three trapped teenagers out alive.

Alison Belsham needed a last-chance stem cell transplant, so doctors searched the world for a match - and found Rachel Rees, a Welsh woman living in Australia who grew up about an hour from Alison's home.

Noah Ahmed, 15, stepped off a London train at Peterborough station and had an epileptic seizure that dropped him onto the tracks. His mum hit the alarm and his stepdad reached for him, but strangers, station staff, a nurse, and an off-duty police officer rushed in before the train could move. Noah walked away with only scratches.

Chris Lemons was a saturation diver left alone on the North Sea floor in 2012 when his umbilical - supplying gas, heat and light - was severed by a drifting ship. He had about five minutes of emergency gas. Colleagues found him around 30 minutes later, unconscious on the seabed. Two rescue breaths brought him back, with no lasting brain damage.

Officers Dennis Stachura and Marco Lomibao took a 1:35 AM call in Glendale Heights, Illinois. A car had sunk 12 feet into a frozen pond at 1 degree Fahrenheit. They arrived to find three people - hands visible above the ice. They jumped in, broke through with shovels and a sledgehammer, and held all three afloat until backup arrived. Everyone survived.

Angela Hernandez was driving Highway 1 in Big Sur when she swerved to avoid a small animal and her Jeep plunged 200 feet off the cliff to the rocky shore below. She survived the crash, broke out of her partially submerged car, and spent seven days alone on the beach - using a 10-inch hose from the wreck to siphon fresh water dripping from cliff moss. Two hikers spotted the crushed Jeep and found her alive.

Lesly Mucutuy was 13 when her plane crashed deep in the Colombian Amazon. Her mother died four days later. Lesly kept her three younger siblings alive for 40 days - including an 11-month-old - feeding the baby formula from the wreck, then plain water. Soldiers found them 3 miles from the crash site.

A Croatian music teacher survived a train plunging into a frozen river, a plane door blowing open mid-flight, a bus crash into a river, two separate car fires, being struck by a bus, and driving off a cliff. He walked away from all seven. Then in 2003, he won the Croatian national lottery. He gave most of the money away and said he was finally happy.

Bear Grylls broke three vertebrae in a parachuting accident in Zambia in 1996, falling from 16,000 feet. His surgeon said he was "within a whisker" of permanent paralysis. Eighteen months later, on May 26, 1998, he stood on the summit of Mount Everest at age 23.

In 1999, a Swedish doctor fell through ice while skiing and spent 80 minutes trapped underwater. Her body temperature dropped to 56.7°F - the lowest ever recorded in a surviving patient. She had no heartbeat. Doctors spent 9 hours reviving her. She later became a radiologist at the very hospital that saved her life.

During Hurricane Harvey, a woman in Houston went into labor. Floodwater surrounded her home. Neighbors waded into waist-deep water and formed a human chain so she could use them as guardrails to reach a flatbed truck waiting on higher ground. The truck drove her to the hospital. She gave birth safely. A neighborhood of strangers became a delivery room.

Austin Appelbee was 13 when his family's kayak flipped off Western Australia. His mother told him to swim for shore. He swam two hours with a life jacket. When it slowed him, he took it off. He swam two more hours without one. He reached shore and sprinted another mile to find a phone. His family was found 14 km out after 10 hours. Everyone survived.