Skier trapped upside down

Skier trapped upside down

Skier trapped upside down, A woman's rescue after she became stuck upside down in the snow (for how long?) was caught on camera (find video of her story). The woman said she accidentally fell into a creek bed while skiing with her husband (at which popular resort?). She apparently flipped head over heels into fresh powder and started sinking "People were saying, 'Oh my God. Oh my God,' holding their hands on their heads," limo driver Homer Martinez told The Associated Press about the carnage at the scene of the accident. "I saw people telling other people not to go there, 'You don't want to see this.'"New York firefighters and medics were quickly on the scene, supporting the bus by wood planks. "As we back through the bus we found more people pinned because of the stanchion," FDNY Chief of Department Edward Kilduff told the New York Daily News. "We had about seven or eight people pinned in the rear of the bus that we had to actually cut out by removing seats or cut a hole in the roof of the bus."
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that the New York State Police is leading the investigation and that city agencies have set up a Family Assistance Center to provide family members with information regarding their loved ones. People seeking information about those injured or killed on the bus are urged to call 311 or 212-NEWYORK.

A Lake Tahoe, Calif., woman narrowly escaped death last week after she became trapped upside down in the snow for half an hour with diminishing amounts of oxygen while her husband struggled in vain to free her.

The dramatic rescue of Kristin Jacobsen was caught on camera after she accidentally fell into a creek bed while skiing with her husband Eric at the Sierra at Tahoe resort. Kristin flipped head over heels into the powder while the two were heading down a black diamond trail with fresh powder. The couple regularly hit the slopes there and say they know that mountain quite well.

"Just as Kristin was coming up behind my right, I noticed a small divot in the snow. Just as I'm saying the words, 'don't go there!' Kristin just literally disappeared," Eric Jacobsen said.

Kristin told ABC News that her feet came up and her head went down immediately, and then she began to sink. She said that her initial thought was that it might be an avalanche.

From the surface, all that could be seen was the bottoms of her skis.

"Snow packs in around you like cement. So it was silent, I couldn't hear a thing," Kristin said. "I couldn't hear Eric screaming."Eric told ABC News that all he was able to do was dive in and try to dig his wife out. But the more he dug, the more she sank. Soon the snow started to swallow him too, and he became stuck up to my waist, in a situation he described as "just helpless." But his wife's quick thinking may have helped save her life.

"I knew I needed to make an air pocket, but I couldn't move my arms to create a pocket. I tried to rock my head back and forth a little bit but I was able to make maybe an inch or two of air, and I knew it wasn't going to last for very long," Kristin said. "It wasn't like being buried underground. It was a sea of white. When I started to lose consciousness I remember trickles over my eyes, it might have been tears."

Luckily, Zach McAllister and Merick Rickman from the mountain's ski patrol were nearby.

"I just happened to be riding up the lift and saw her husband digging. I don't know [how long] she was in the hole before I saw her husband, but he said that it took us approximately 10 minutes to get there," McAllister told ABC News.

It took the ski patrol 20 minutes more to dig Kristin out as she was buried head first in the snow.

"She was completely unconscious," McAllister said. "She was completely cyanotic, which means she was blue all over. When I got down there I just opened her airway and started to clear her chest of snow. Doing so she spontaneously started breathing on her own.

"We were possibly minutes away from not seeing her alive again," he added.

Kristin said that after the ordeal was over, "we just held each other and cried."

McAllister and Rickman said that the couple was very lucky to have survived the incident, and that they did everything right. The couple says they are thankful that the ski patrol showed up in time.

"If they literally hadn't arrived exactly when they did it would be a very different story," Kristin said.

I am airlifted out of the glacier to the Whistler Health Clinic where my fears are confirmed Although I am alive, I am paralyzed from the waist down. Later that night I am sent down to Vancouver to be patched up to live in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.

Luckily, the doctors were wrong, and my spinal cord injury is incomplete vs. complete. But luck is an understatement. Nine years later, although I am considered 40% paralyzed below the waist, I have learned to walk again, learned to cross country ski, and even learned to snowboard again. Not everyone can do what I did. Most people with a spinal cord injury do not have the opportunity to get any muscles back and even if they do, they don’t get enough of what they need to walk.

So, I am lucky, but I worked hard at it. I set goals. I stayed positive and looked at the world with what I could do, not what I couldn’t do. I took up yoga and believed that I could think my way into a pose even if I couldn’t do the pose. I thought to myself to just try every day to do more, to learn more, to be strong and understand that if I fall down, it is because I am pushing the limits. In fact, I learned to walk again by falling down and getting back up and falling some more. Metaphorically I believe this is what success is all about – falling down and getting back up until you don’t fall down anymore.

Staying positive and looking for the positive aspect in everything I do is my key. I like to say I can turn two negatives into a positive. It sounds corny, but I believe it and I believe in myself. It doesn’t mean I don’t ask for help. It means that because I try to help myself in a positive manner, others will believe in me and help me too. All I need to do is ask.

Last month, I received an email from my super cool friend, Olympian Nicole Forrester, asking for people to climb the CN Tower with other national team members to raise money for the United Way - a charity I have always believed in. They help people ask for a better life, thus helping communities and families throughout the world.

I wasn’t sure if I could do it, so I drove down to Vancouver and trained in a stairway doing 20 flights at a time and taking the elevator down and doing it seven more times. I figured I could do it, the 147 flights of stairs (1776 steps), in about 35 minutes.