Stuart Diver – Michmutters
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Australia

The 1997 Thredbo disaster remembered 25 years on, skiers to commemorate landslide by carrying flares down the mountain

Mark Pigott remembers the cries of black crows breaking a heavy silence after the Thredbo disaster.

Pigott, an Olympic skier, watched from afar as rescue workers searched through rubble in the days after the landslide that claimed 18 lives at the ski resort in July 1997.

“Whenever they thought they could hear something, they went: ‘Hush, hush, hush’,” he says.

“You could hear a pin drop across the resort. Often the only thing you could hear [were] the black crows.”

Stuart Diver carried away after rescue
Ski instructor Stuart Diver was the only survivor. He was rescued after many hours of tunneling through unstable debris to where he was trapped under concrete slabs.(ABC News (video still))

Pigott — who competed in acroski at the 1992 Winter Olympics — was in Thredbo and Perisher for training at the time of the landslide, which decimated two ski lodges just before midnight on July 30.

While staying at the nearby town of Jindabyne, Pigott was woken up by a dawn phone call from his father.

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