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In 2003, a British politics student named Ken 

Jones took a holiday from his studies and traveled 

to Romania, where he wanted to scale Moldoveanu 

Peak. He almost made it to the summit when the 

earth shook and a pair of avalanches dumped tons 

of snow on top of him, trapping him helpless on the 

mountain. The second impact shattered Jones's 

pelvis and broke his leg, but the former Army 

paratrooper managed to hobble ten miles through 

the freezing cold over the next three days to a 

remote Transylvanian village, where a local doctor 

saved his leg and his life. He also lost 2/3 of his 

stomach as a result of ulcers he developed during 

his ordeal.

When the ground shifts beneath our feet, it 

illustrates exactly how fragile the works of man 

truly are. The Nepalese earthquake of April 2015 

was a horrific example – 7.8 on the Richter scale, 

it was the worst quake to hit the country since the 

1930s. The quake killed over 8,800 people and left 

hundreds of thousands homeless, with whole 

villages reduced to rubble. But in the city of 

Kathmandu, there was an amazing story of 

survival. A young man named Pemba Tamang was 

working in a guesthouse when the quake brought 

it down around him. He spent five days trapped 

with nothing but a small amount of butter to eat, 

but that nutrition kept him alive until a crew dug 

him out.

The flash floods that sweep through Arizona's red rock 

canyons aren't as massive in scale as some of the other 

disasters on this list, but they can be just as fatal. In 

1997, a tour guide named Pancho Quintana was leading 

a group through Antelope Canyon when a sudden rain 

storm hit over 15 miles away. The downpour drained 

into the thin, twisting canyon, rapidly making water 

levels rise to ten feet deep. Quintana tried to climb a 

ledge and pull some of his charges up with him, but one 

man, caught in the undertow, made them fall in a panic. 

The tour guide was caught in an eddy but managed to 

catch enough breaths to keep him alive until he was 

ejected into a wider part of the canyon, but everybody 

else on the trip was killed

When the massive plates that hold up Earth's crust start 

shifting and scraping, things get pretty shaky up on the 

surface. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was caused by 

faults in the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden system, and 

wreaked immense havoc in the capital of Port-Au-

Prince. The death toll is at least 230,000 people, and for 

27 days Evans Monsignac thought he was going to be 

one of them. He was the absolute last person found 

alive, surviving for nearly a month in the rubble of his 

home. For most of that time he was pinned immobile by 

concrete slabs, sipping leaking sewer water to stay 

hydrated. Amazingly, his body wasn't that ravaged by 

his ordeal, despite severe malnutrition and dehydration.

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