Alive Again | E3 | Twenty Minutes Left To Live

You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

You always hear the question what would you do if you had twenty minutes left to live? I found out twice. My name is Anily's Cochran. I survived a nuclear threat and a climate disaster, and this is my story.

Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death. Mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

It was the morning of January thirteenth, twenty and eighteen. I was working on a fleet of boats out in Maui, Hawaii. I was the first meet of one of our fleets of vessels at Pacific Well Foundation. We would take people out on the water to go on well watching trips, snorkeling trips, dinner cruises, some set cruises.

We like to do education on our boats to teach.

About the whales and the islands, and I was on microphone when all of a sudden, this sound went off throughout the boat, coming out of everyone's cell phones all at once, kind of sounds like an amber alert. There was over a hundred of us on this relatively small boat, so it was quite startling. This woman from the back of the boat was holding her phone out in front of her and kind of like just staggering and clutching the chairs as she came down this walkway towards me.

It was a beautiful day. The skies were clear and blue, the water was.

Calm, and we were all about to die. I went and spoke to my captain a couple of quick googles. He was able to sort of piece together the amount of time. He said it would be less than twenty minutes. My job as the first mate is to be the person that communicates between the captain and the crew. So the captain makes orders and then I go and I delegate that out to the crew and decide who should be executing what task, and in what order those tasks

The wind coming from O Wacoo.

We felt like a Wahoo would be the most likely target of a nuclear missile. We decided to just take our boat out to see far away from any fallout and hope for the best.

But we also.

Grabbed life jackets and made nervous people my ties and called our families and said goodbye, which was really really hard. You always hear the question what would you do if you had twenty minutes left to live? Everybody has such a different reaction to that situation. One of my friends was a photographer, and he happened to be in the harbor holding a really nice camera, and so he decided to set it up to record and built a little rock structure around it to capture any possible media he could.

And ran to her dog.

There was a lot of tension between the United States and North Korea at the time. That made the threat of a nuclear missile attack much more believable. You know, when need to just think about geographically too. It would be most simple to aim a missile at the point of the US that's closest to North Korea.

And that would be Hawaii.

I think it was nineteen minutes until they told us that they had been running a drill that day and somebody mistook it for a real situation, and so they had triggered a very real alert. But it was after the missile would have impacted that we found out that it was a false alarm. That afternoon, when we came back to shore, our beautiful town Leahina was bustling with

It was a really really special place.

There's this underlying richness to the culture there, even though today it presents like a very tourist town with cute galleries and experiences on the ocean and restaurants by the seat.

People that I've.

Come to know in Lehina are incredibly strong and prideful.

In the best way.

Had moved to an apartment that was right behind Fleetwood's, which is a bar that's famously owned by Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac. It was located right in the center of Lahaina town on Front Street.

It was the core of the town. I had lived in this unit.

That was affordable until it was sold to developers and they were going to turn it into vacation rentals, which you.

Know, broke our heart.

There's nowhere for the people who work there to live that can afford it. We were being priced out of paradise. So it was a very scary time for our unit. US residents banded together, did media interviews, talk to local politicians whatever we could. Ultimately, the county ended up buying the property back from the developers and kept it as housing for people that needed it. Because of the action taken by the residents of our unit. I lived with people who had a deep tie to Lahina and they

Lifted for many people.

We had made it through his COVID hump, which was remarkable, and then the worst they hit our town. On August eighth of twenty twenty three. Early in the morning, I had woken up to realize that we had no power, self service was limited.

The weather was stormy.

It was incredibly windy, some of the strongest gusts of wind I had ever seen. I remember that morning actually taking a video outside of my window, thinking, you know, wow, the wind is never whistled like this, like it's making this sound. It's almost like there's somebody singing on the wind. It's so different sounding than any wind I've ever heard before. There had been a fire that morning up the mountain from us. Not very long after the fire began, they

So I asked him.

I was like, Freeman, do you smell something? And He's like, no, no, no, I don't smell anything. So I was like, Okay, maybe I'm just being a little oversensitive. A lot of us were used to them, like burning the sugar cane fields, and like the smell of just this burning that's kind of throughout the town constantly. So I went back inside. I took a really really quick shower, and then I was sitting inside and I heard something I couldn't even place what it was. It was just like the weirdest sound.

You can't burn in an ocean.

Right, Embers started to fly over our heads and land on the buildings, and he was spraying the embers with a hose, you know, he would spray one in ten would fall, and then he would get another one, and a twenty would fall. And it was becoming this exponential problem where it's like, hey man, you can't put all of these out.

There's no way.

And we're also starting to lose time, and at this point his wife began to.

Screen that they needed to go.

I have a video where the sky would go hitch black and then it would open up for the split second as the wind would like rush through all the spoke was clear, and it would be like you'd realized it was daytime, and then it would just be nighttime again. As those embers started to burn, we made the call that we have to go. Freeman didn't want to leave, and we just kept telling him he had to.

I was trying to get them both to come into my car.

Freeman, for whatever reason, didn't want to get in, and Atina said that She wanted to take him down to Front Street by foot, which was concerning to me, but also there's so little time to fight people. In a moment like that, I saw the like walk away as like fires kind of like appeared between me and them, and at that point I lost sight of them. Behind that wall of fire, I began driving into the most pitch black I've ever seen. It's not driving through smoke,

It was monumental.

At one point, a tourist named Naim popped into my car in a panic and he said, turn and go up the mountain.

I had to tell him, like, that's where I just came from.

The fire's coming from that direction, and he's like, well, I just came from down the road the other direction from us, and there's fire there too, and as I was like, I'm not going up the mountain, and so he got out of my car and he disappeared into the wall of s Hope. Fortunately, right about that time, I saw Freeman and Atina making it on foot to this exact same area, so I jumped out to talk

Your clothes on fire.

And there was about one hundred people gathered on the coast. People's hair was catching no fire. There was multiple times I like shouted down to somebody, like you were on fire. Some people had already got into the ocean and begun drifting out to sea. I saw that there's people in the ocean, but I couldn't even see how far out people were going to. You just couldn't see that far.

And.

It was very hot.

It's hard to describe, like the radiating heat that comes from an entire town burning down. The ground itself began to heat up like an oven, and we were sitting on old lava rocks. I was cooking, but I was very clear headed, and I thought more about, you know, what it would truly take to survive each moment and each woe, It being a small decision, not looking at the big picture, but like what do I do right now? It was concerned about the quality of the air, so

Of a comfort.

We didn't want to go too far out because there was sharks and currents, and it was nighttime. The waves are just pushing you around, and Freeman couldn't have kept himself up in the surf, and so he stayed on the rocks. The wind was pushing flaming debris all around us, while the ocean was being just whipped up by this intense wind, and all around you could just hear the scream of people panicked and confused. I heard screams of

You see them go up into flames, and then they.

Would just sort of it's hard to describe the way that they would just kind of collapse in on themselves, like they gave a big sigh.

And just sort of imploded. It was just so horrifying.

And also, you know, it hurts your eyes the light and the smoke and everything, and we want to shield your face from the heat. We all got very badly burned on our faces from just the heat of everything happening, but also from our masks rubbing up against our noses. I would stop throughout the night and kind of peek my head over the rock wall and just sort of see how everything was progressing. And I just remember specifically the building that was across from us.

It went through this.

Evolution where the walls kind of burnt off of it, but you could see inside and the tables were still set as if they were going to do dinner service that night. And then you look away for another moment and look back and now the building's gone and it's just a one foot pile of rubble on the ground. The biggest threat that we were facing was the smoke. We were submerging ourselves in the shallowest of the water.

All throughout town. All these people had abandoned their cars.

There's like a hundred of us, all of our vehicles parked behind our heads.

The ground was beginning to shake with every single explosion.

I was beginning to get very, very fearful, especially because now we're we're hiding behind this rock wall, and there's there's a car, you know, two feet on the other side of that rock wall from us, and the second that it explodes, are these rocks going to come tumbling down on us. The fumes that come off of a car explosion are noxious. We could not breathe. You would inhale,

Have a voice.

Finally, is able to kind of like whisper to her like I can't talk, and she said the same thing back to me.

I heard it in her voice too.

We kind of like gestured to each other like we should go towards Freeman, and we both stood up and we walked maybe five feet, and I've I've never felt such a level of like extreme exhaustion and oxygen deprivation, and like I'm a free diver. I lived in a world of oxygen deprivation. I was used to the thee of having a lot of carbon dioxide in your system, like that's actually something I had specifically trained for it.

And I couldn't walk one more step.

I walked about five feet and I quite literally collapsed on the ground. A Tina did as well, and I was like I can't get to him, and she said I can't either.

We were in the surf.

There was moments where we were holding each other's hands, and sometimes we would just squeeze each other's hands to let each other know that we were there because we would lose consciousness. I just remember kind of trying to like like whisper talk. Every once in a while. It was like, just keep breathing, stay awake. And there's times I saw her drifting away and I would pull her bag. And there's times I was dripped away and she pulled me back. It was close to dying, and in that

I'm so grateful to the ocean itself when there was a fire on three sides of us to be this like open.

Arms of comfort, and for that moment of like, as I was quite literally losing my own life, it was going to be my reminder to keep breathing. The wind was still just bearing down on us the whole night, and it blew some of that, like those most horrible fumes away. Suddenly I could talk again. I looked at a teen and I was like, hey, we're here, and I remember her looking at me. She goes, you are shaking. I was extremely hypothermic from just laying motionless in the

Up over the rock wall and.

Huddled down like near the the embers of Waikiki Brewery as it was like finished. She gets burned down to the ground just to get some warmth from the fire. I burned myself badly doing that, but but it was the only way to stay warm. Once I had regained my senses, I shouted to a teena that I wanted to check on Freeman. We both started making our way towards him, she on the rocks and me on the road.

I can't do anything for him, it's too late.

Back when we were fighting for the right to stay in Lahina as residents, Freeman had spoken to a news outlet and was quoted saying I was born in Lehina and I will die in Lahina. Lohina was so important to Freeman, and Freeman was so important to Leahina that I'm glad that Freeman never had to see Lahina gone. At about nine or nine thirty PM, and I was able to finally make a call out to the police and say that we needed to rescue. They were able

Now.

Rescue didn't come for us until after midnight. Are all to bit Rescue was well later. We had quite a prolonged period of time just kind of waiting after the fire was out, which was a surreal experience. I began to sort of wander around the street and see some of the destruction, things like all of the rims of all the cars. The aluminum wheels were melted to the ground, and you would just see these streams of melted silver metal running through the streets.

It was remarkably quiet.

I think there was a lot of people around, but nobody was really talking to each other. We were all sort of just quietly taking it all in and moving around the scene, just kind of looking at all these things that suddenly looked so different than they had just a couple of hours earlier.

There was fire on all sides.

Since it was like a whole two blocks away, at that point, it felt much less threatening than it had all night, and I was like, oh, I'm safe to take a nap now, which is wild in retrospect. I laid down the sidewalk and I took about a ten minute nap, and then the fire trucks came back to rescue us. At that first shelter that I was at, there was a heavy focus on like figuring out the medical needs. My injuries that I sustained included mostly burns. I burned my rear end very badly from sitting on

Them that they were safe.

We got to see some beautiful moments, like families reconnecting, the tears of parents finding their children out of shelter. There's no words, There are no words to describe the amount of love and emotion in that moment of reconnection.

I saw that playing out multiple times.

Daily, and also tragic loss boards of names getting bigger every day with all the people looking for their family. These events are escalating in quantity and severity over time, and.

That's a factor of climate change.

It's something that we've been told about since I was a child, that this was coming, this was the real threat. I remember as a child being told that, you know, in fifteen, in twenty years, we're going to start seeing these effects, and like surprise, everybody, we're here.

It's that time. And the storms will continue to get worse.

The wind will blow more, there will be more dry grass, there will be more lightning, there will be more things that will cause disasters, whether that's fire or not. But fire is going to be a big threat coming into all of our futures. It's too late for us to

Brings a level of clarity to your life.

I'm hopeful that for me personally, you know there will still be a brighter tomorrow. Unfortunately that's still tomorrow. I'm still getting through it.

Welcome back. This is a Live again joining me for a conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story. Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Dye, and I'm your host, Dan Bush.

One thing that really struck me about this story from start to finish is her level of storytelling detail in every single one of these incidents. And I'm wondering if that's something that struck you as you were talking with her.

Yeah, what a great storyteller. And the love that she had for Lahina. You know this her love for the place of Freeman's love for the place.

You know.

It was a heartbreaking story.

And she talked about at the end there I hear her telling stories about people reuniting and having these precious moments of reconnecting and finding their loved ones, and all the tragedy of those who didn't and will never does she talk about did she talk about people's hope or resilience? Like, did she talk much about that?

I don't think there was time for her to have hope. I think it was such a constant mirage of horror that they were surviving minute to minute.

I think I told you guys once. I was on a documentary assignment in the island of Samata in Indonesia after the tsunami hit, and it hit in Christmas two thousand and four, so I was there shortly like in February two thousand and five, and there were mass graves, you know, from this horrific tsudami event, and I witnessed those, and I witnessed towns that had had eighty percent of their persons wiped out, so you got twenty percent of

One of the benefits of it being in Hawaii as there was this great Hawaiian music. People would be playing guitars and singing songs, and so there was a lot of life in that recovery period for her, for sure. But then she's lost her livelihood. She's had to move back to Washington, d C.

You know.

Another part of the story was they went through COVID and were out of work for two years and their community was finally coming back together when this hit and just kind of destroyed it. And she also talked about how much she loved the sea and wanted to be out there by the ocean, and it's been taken away from her.

But yeah, this is I think probably going to be one of many horrific cautionary tales that we're gonna continue to hear about, and that.

Sort of the theme running throughout about humanity's ability to just really f things up. I mean, because you hear the first story that she tells about the nuclear test.

I remember that.

I remember hearing about that, and it's just so awful.

Current events, Well, just that whole surreal opening to her story being out there on the whale watching expedition when they get this text that nuclear annihilation is coming your way. You have twenty minutes, and their thought was, well, maybe we can boat out of the fall zone. And I'm like, there is no And I just think that's a threat that we kind of forgotten about. But it's very real. You know, nuclear proliferation and annihilation is never went away as a worldwide threat.

You know, it's worse.

It's godden worse.

And you know, like as somebody else said in her story, like, and I think about this a lot. I'm sure a lot of us do in this room as writers, as we experience the world through our five senses, right, Like that's and so that's the way we convey our world to others.

And God, I mean in so many places she does that. She talks about how.

She was watching the evolution of the building falling down, and first the wall disappears and you could see the interior and these sort of perfectly set tables and then you look up again and it's sort of twisted metal. Anyway, It's it's these it's these details, these sensory details of the heat, all of it that makes the.

Story so affecting, Like sitting this side of my face was burned because that's where the wind was coming from.

Yeah, and the sounds of the exploding cars getting closer and closer. It's just she she captured these sort of in between moments were the last still living thing is still being there live and you're watching it burn.

Right right, And you know, if she wasn't sort of I guess I, you know, straight up convert about climate change and it sounds like she, you know, was aware of that and before, but you know, of course she is now. And it just sort of made made me think about how hearing stories like hers, or experiencing this oneself is the only way, it's the only thing that's really going to change people.

I just don't know why it has to be something you experience firsthand to understand the threat of it, and I and and my reaction to hearing about it, even before I spoke with Analyse, was when I heard about what happened in the Heina, I thought, if a foreign nation had done this to us, we would go to war with them immediately. But we're not going to war against climate change.

I mean, I mean it's because we it's because we live in this like corporate hellscape, and it's less about fixing things for humanity and more about like increasing profit margins. And it's just like for the oil companies, it's just it's just cheaper to keep you know, pumping oil out of the earth, burning it and like raising the cost of gas, you know, and then spending a chunk of your profits on lobbying, you know, Congress.

I think about the biodiversity that's already been lost. We're in the middle of a mass extinction right now that nobody wants to talk about. And I think about that. And it's not just the loss of you know, an accelerated number of species per year, like one hundredfold, but those species like we're just now starting to understand, you know,

Yeah, everything else a library that's taken millions of years to write each book, Each piece of DNA has taken hundreds of millions of years to re and we're destroying it.

She's just there's this resilience that humans are capable of, and you know, anytime I come across it, it's inspiring. So people who otherwise maybe didn't know they had it in them, and then all of a sudden they do, and it gives me some hope.

For sure. There's nothing more sobering than the consequences of our actions.

That's like.

Next time on Alive Again, we hear the story of Kathy Preston, a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Nazis and hungry. She lived to become an educator, telling her truth to thousands of children in the hopes that they move forward and vigilance and kindness.

And they kept coming closer and closer, and they were using their bayonets to rifle through the hay and stab the hay. They got closer and closer, and then I hear a thump, and I open an eye and there's a big black boot next to my face and the bayonet comes down one inch from this cheek, and.

Then he pulls it out.

I still remember the noise it made as it came out of the wood, and I think that's when I realized what it means to die. I'm not a victim. I'm a survivor, and I'm going to fight for this until I stopped talking, because I don't believe that we have to give up to evil. The only way we can fight it is to resist it.

Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brentdye, Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovin, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima Elkali and Nams Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slovitchca, Brit Dye, and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovet and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host,