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Abstract

Alive is a story of how members of the Old Christians Rugby Club (a part of the Stella Maris Catholic College in Montevideo, Uruguay) and others survived for ten weeks from October to December 1972 on a particularly desolate part of the Andes mountain range. Traveling from Uruguay to Chile for a rugby match, their plane went down killing the crew and some passengers, stranding the remaining. Forty-five passengers started on the trip, only sixteen survive. How they survived and what occurred during that time frame are the discussion of this paper. The dynamics of the group that actually enabled them to survive that long with limited supplies and unbelievable probability of survival will also be summated. Alive is an unbelievable story of just how powerful group dynamics and human nature are when faced with almost impossible odds. Those who had managed to stay alive later pointed out that "it was their combined efforts which saved their lives" (Read, 1974, p. 310).









Discussion

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read is the unimaginable mental, physical, and moral struggle by airplane crash survivors to stay alive during a ten-week ordeal in the Cordillera De Los Andes of South America. In 1972, a small aircraft carrying forty team members, staff, family, and friends of an Uruguayan rugby team along with 5 crew members en route to Chile, smashes into a mountain in Argentina killing dozens aboard, however nearly two-dozen manage to survive the impact. AS few days after the crash, on a patched up radio receiver, they find out that the search for the plane has been called off. The crash victims are forced to rely on their own initiative to endure the harsh conditions at such a high altitude. Several more die from injuries suffered in the crash, inadequate medical supplies, a subsequent avalanche, and prolonged exposure before sixteen...