Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read l Summary & Study Guide (3 page)

Undaunted by the government's
lack of help,
Paez
Vilaro
mounted his own search. He researched who owned private aircrafts and paid them
to take him searching. He also set out by foot to all of the remote villages in
search of news about the missing airplane. He became known as the foolish man
searching for his lost son. He searched an area of forty-one miles around the
plane's path, but his efforts were fruitless. Through Ponce de Leon he asked
for more information from
Croiset
.
Croiset
provided more details. He also said that he no
longer sensed life on the plane. The SAR was briefly convinced, in light of
this new evidence, to send a token few airplanes searching in the specified
area. Airplanes cannot be flown low in the mountain range and a half-buried,
white plane cannot be seen from the height of an airplane. They would need
helicopters, but with the country's political turmoil, they were unlikely to
find anything so extravagant. Back in Montevideo, the women were becoming
impatient with the lack of progress. With their prodding, Jorge
Zerbino
, Gustavo's father, and Luis
Surraco
,
whose daughter was romantically involved with Robert
Canessa
,
agreed to aid in the search. Not only did
Surraco
want
Canessa
to return safely, he was also adept at
reading maps, which could be useful. The Andes
mountains
had experienced record snow falls that winter causing the SAR to push the date
that they planned to resume the search back from January to February, and every
day was critical. The three men,
Paez
,
Zerbino
, and
Surraco
, hired
guides to take them into the mountains. They had the proper equipment that
their sons lacked, but they were not as physically fit. They came to the
sobering reality of what their loved ones were suffering through. The men were
not convinced by
Croiset
. They, especially
Paez
, had had the opportunity to search the
precordillera
, and their results were always negative. They
were more inclined to search near the
Tinguiririca
volcano but did not have the means to do so. They prepared to return home.
Before doing so they donated money to school children so that they could form a
soccer team in honor of the Old Christians.
 

Section Five
Summary and Analysis

October 29th, the seventeenth
day, began normally for the survivors. They completed their chores, and when
the sun went down, they entered the plane. The injured and couples climbed in
first and slept where it was crowded but most protected. The strongest among
the survivors took turns sleeping in the exposed area near the opening where
there was room for five to sleep. On this evening those were Juan Carlos Menendez,
Pancho
Delgado,
Roque
, the
mechanic, and
Numa
Turcatti
.
They all dozed off and fell asleep except Diego Storm and Roy Harley, who had
just switched sleeping positions. Roy felt an odd vibration,
then
heard a metallic sound. He was startled and jumped up only to find himself
covered waist high in snow. An avalanche had pummeled the plane and entered
through their makeshift barriers. Roy remembered
Carlitos
Paez
being directly to his right so he dug for him
first. He uncovered his head and torso and then went on to help others whose
hands he could see above the layer of snow. He freed
Canessa
and
Fito
, who in turn freed Eduardo,
Inciarte
, Daniel Fernandez, and Bobby Francois.
Carlitos
Paez
uncovered
Zerbino
,
Parrado
, and
Canessa
.
Inciarte
and
Zerbino
freed
Numa
Tarcatti
and
Pancho
Delgado who
were buried but had a pocket of air underneath the plane's salvaged door. Pedro
Algorta
and Javier
Methol
were among the last to be found.

The avalanche had claimed eight
more victims. The nineteen who survived the avalanche were exhausted and in
worse shape than before. Their food supply was buried; their clothes were wet;
their bodies were cold, and they lacked the mittens, pillows and blankets they
had created over the last two weeks. The cabin was filled with snow making the
area even smaller. A second avalanche completely buried the plane in snow. No
more lives were lost but air flow was cut off. Carbon dioxide started to build
and a metal rod was used to puncture the snow outside and let in fresh air. The
avalanches were followed by a blizzard that lasted two days.
Parrado
expressed his wish to leave as soon as the snow
stopped, but
Fito
talked him out of it.
Algorta
remembered that the snow stops and summer begins on
November 15th in the Andes. This would make for an easier journey and would
coincide with a full moon. The thought of hiking made them think of the energy
they lacked. Their food supply had been buried in the avalanche and they were
forced to eat the bodies that had recently died and remained in the cabin.
Cleaning the new fallen snow out of the cabin took the next eight days. During
this time, the survivors selected their
expeditionaries
.
They selected
Parrado
,
Turcatti
,
and
Canessa
because they were the most mentally and
physically fit.
 
An additional three men,
Paez
, Harley, and
Vinzintin
,
were chosen to go on a one-day, information-gathering trip. The trip started
out easily for
Paez
, Harley and
Vinzintin
.
By midday the sun shone brightly and melted the snow. The men sank into it, and
their progress was impaired. The disillusioned group headed back to the plane.
Every crest and valley looked identical.
Carlitos
,
and to a lesser extent Roy, suffered greatly and wanted to give up. They were
spurred on by
Vinzintin
and eventually made it back
to the Fairchild.

The next expedition would be even
harder, so
Parrado
,
Turcatti
,
and
Canessa
received special treatment. They hoarded
clothes and food and did less work under the pretense of building their
strength. During the ten days that they waited for the weather to improve,
Arturo
Nogueira
passed away. It was a painful
reminder that the expedition had to be successful and soon.
Turcatti
developed infected boils on his leg and was replaced as an expeditionary by
Vinzintin
, who had fared well on the mini expedition. On
November 17th, the three departed in search of help. They carried with them
blankets, meat, water and seat covers for snowshoeing. Not long after leaving,
they discovered the tail of the plane. With it they found luggage which they
rummaged for anything useful. They also discovered the batteries, which they
hoped would bring power to the cockpit's radio. With this in mind they returned
to the Fairchild on the following day. While they spent a night of relative
peace in the tail, Rafael
Echavarren
passed away in
the cabin. They were greeted with this news when they returned to the Fairchild
on the following morning.
 

Section Six
Summary and Analysis

Madelon
(
Vilero
)
Rodriguez and Estela Perez continued to believe in
Croiset's
visions. They still believed that their sons were alive and would not stop
searching. Some of the other parents were less convinced but still pledged
their help because they wanted to know what had happened to the plane. Even
Croiset
himself doubted that any survivors remained. The
Strauch
sisters prayed fervently to the Virgin of
Garabandal
. The parents met with the commander-in-chief of
the Uruguayan Air Force on December 5th and requested his help. He explained
how unlikely it was that there were survivors but he granted their request. On
December 11th, the parents accompanied military personnel aboard a C-47 plane
in search of their children. While traveling one of the propellers stopped
turned and the pilot performed an emergency landing. The parents were unwilling
to waste any more time waiting for it to be fixed, so they hired another plane
to take them to Santiago. There the men split into teams. One team would search
by land, one by air, and another would try to locate a peasant miner, who,
according to rumor, saw the plane crash. They called their plan Operation
Christmas.

Section Seven
Summary and Analysis

Canessa
and
Parrado
remained at the Fairchild and attempted to make the cockpit radio functional.
It was
Canessa's
opinion that they shouldn't risk
their lives hiking again unless all of their other options had been exhausted.
The radio had over sixty broken wires exiting from its back and it became Roy
Harley's job to reassemble all of them. Roy resisted the idea, but the others
appealed to his sense of loyalty. There were some that were not physically well
enough to survive the trek through the mountains. It was Roy's job to make the
radio work, so help could be summoned and the hike avoided. Repairing the radio
was not an easy task and tensions rose.
Canessa
,
Parrado
,
Vizintin
and Roy Harley
had differing opinions about how to ration food and productivity.

Back at the Fairchild the other
thirteen survivors were also bickering. It was discovered that someone was
pilfering extra food. Additionally, the
Strauch
cousins made their own group. They supported each other almost to the expense
of excluding the others.
Canessa
had the transistor
radio with him at the tail. The radio team heard news that the search would be
resumed by the Uruguayan Air Force. This information brought mixed emotions.
Should they risk their lives hiking or wait for help? If they waited for help
and it never came hadn't they wasted more time and languished farther? They
also had a very specific window of better, if not great, weather to utilize. As
a compromise they continued to work on repairing the radio, preparing for the
hike, and dragging the luggage out into the snow, creating the unmistakable
shape of a large cross which they hoped would be visible by aircraft.

Canessa
and Harley worked on the radio
despite their frustrations and mounting lack of faith in its functionality.
Vizintin
discovered a material in the tail's heating system
that would make a great insulator from the cold should the radio not work and
they were forced to resume the hike. From this the survivors sewed a sleeping
bag large enough for three people so that they could also benefit from the
tripled body heat. When it became apparent that no amount of tinkering could
produce a working, two-way radio, the four returned to the Fairchild. Roy was
in no condition for the climb. He was depressed and emaciated. Because he was
not one of the chosen
expeditionaries
, he had been
living off meager rations, and it showed. It was only
Parrado's
sheer strength that brought Roy back safely. After being away for a few days,
the men were struck with the squalor in which they had been living. Half-eaten
and rotted corpses were strewn around the plane. The people's physical bulk had
diminished, and the smell was unbearable. The condors noticed, too. They flew
above the plane hoping to gain their own food source. While the men feared that
the condors would carry away the human meat, it did not go unnoticed that the
condors were the first living thing they had encountered in nearly two months.
It was summer time in the Andes and
time
to begin the
final expedition. While they had waited for summer, they had lost another
friend--
Numa
Turcatti
had
died.

As they expected, the expedition
was rigorous. The climbing was endless and at times, the men felt it was
insurmountable.
Canessa
thought he saw a road in the
opposite direction. He was tempted to switch directions and aim for the road,
but this seemed contrary to the information they had about the plane's path and
their crash position.
Parrado
felt strongly that they
should continue in the original direction. Neither one could survive without
help, so they continued on together leaving the possibility of a road behind
them.
Parrado
was the first to summit the mountain
where the plane had crashed. He hoped for a view of fertile valleys beyond it
but was instead greeted with a landscape of more snow and tall mountains.
Between two of the mountains
Parrado
viewed a Y
shaped valley. If they could just get to that point, the trekking would be
downhill and easier. When
Canessa
and
Vizintin
joined him on the summit he described this plan.
They agreed it was plausible but that it would take too long and they would run
out of food. This dilemma was solved by sending
Vizintin
back to the Fairchild (an easy, downhill task) and dividing between themselves
the meat he would have consumed, thus extending their food supplies for a
longer-than-anticipated journey.