The most incredible stories told by Casey

[robert]

There have been a lot of stories told over the years and this is one of the goose-bumps ones,
from Casey's Top 40 of July 16, 1994...take it away Casey...

Well, now we're up to the song FALL DOWN and our story of the longest fall in history with the victim survived.
Here's the story.
It was back on January 26, 1972 that a Yugoslavian passenger plane was flying its normal route over Czechoslovakia
on its way from Belgrade to Berlin. About halfway through the flight something went terribly wrong.
Investigators don't know whether it was a gas leak or a bomb but the plane blew up - at 33,330 feet in the air.
Most of the passengers were killed immediately by the force of the blast, but one - stewardess Vesna Valovic
was standing by a door the moment the plane exploded and was knocked unconscious.
When the door was blown open by the force of the blast, she was thrown through it into space.
Vesna was lucky she was unconscious because although she was scratched and hurt, she was alive
and she was hurtling towards the earth a 120 miles an hour.
For three long minutes she fell and Vesna's luck continued - because it was the middle
of winter the mountains beneath her were covered with a thick blanket of snow.
By a miracle, a miracle among miracles, she hit a glancing blow against the snow covered cliff,
rolled down a snow covered hill, and landed among some snow blanketed bushes.
When rescuers found Vesna Valovic a few hours later she was nearly frozen.
Her back was broken, one leg and one arm were broken but she was alive.
She had fallen down six miles and lived. A most incredible story.

Now, here's the song that inspired that story, TOAD THE WET SPROCKET with survey song
number 29 on Casey's Top 40 FALL DOWN.

[mstgator]

Shadoe told of the same incident in a 1988 AT40 show as a stretch story for "How Can I Fall" by Breathe. That story has fascinated me since I first read about it in the Guinness Book of World Records back in 1982.

[robert]

Just to correct misspelling Vesna Vulovic

[robert]

Here is another story though it's from the AT40 era, from the countdown of November 9th, 1985:

...Bryan Adams moving up a notch to #13 with "One Night Love Affair" from the LP that went to number one "Reckless".

This is Casey on American Top 40. And now it's that time of the year for that AT40 extra, that #2 smash called "The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald". The song in which singer Gordon Lightfoot told the true story of 29 men who drowned in a storm on Lake Superior back in 1975. Now, what Gordon Lightfoot's song didn't tell was how in two other storms, many years before, on that same terrible date of November 11th, Lake Superior had swallowed more than 300 men in 17 different ships. And November of 1975 was the Edmund Fitzgerald's unfortunate turn.

On a Sunday afternoon the huge cargo ship left port at the western tip of Lake Superior. She was heading for Cleveland with the full load of iron ore. The ship had cost 7 million dollars to build and was longer than two football fields. The crew were all experienced men and the captain had been sailing the Great Lakes for 44 years. By next afternoon they found themselves in a fierce November storm. Winds of hurricane-force were whipping the waves up to 30-foot crests. Well, it was during the night of November 10th or the early morning of November 11th that the Edmund Fitzgerald broke apart and went down. And that tragedy ten years ago, on November 11th, was history repeating itself.

On November 11th, 1930, a storm on Lake Superior had destroyed five ships and drowned 67 people.
On November 11th, 1913, on Lake Superior a storm had sunk twelve ships and drowned 254 people.
A tragic but incredible coincidence.

There were no survivors when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down ten years ago. The wreckage was found the following year in 1976, but no one knows exactly what happened or how it was for those 29 men who died that night. But it probably was much the way Gordon Lightfoot tells it...