KETCHIKAN, Alaska (KTUU/Gray News) – An Alaskan couple are thanking their lucky stars that they survived a massive landslide amid a rainstorm that pummeled their house.
James and Bill Montiver, a couple for 42 years, were full of laughter and positivity Wednesday after they say a series of tragedies and miracles spared them from a landslide last Sunday that tore apart a neighborhood in Ketchikan, KTUU reports.
The slide took out four houses, officials said, and killed one person – Sean Griffin, a longtime resident who was working to clear stormwater drains.
The Montivers were among the dozen or so people rescued from the debris. At the time of the slide, they say they were days from closing on their home and moving out.
“I was just finished packing… and I told Bill, ‘You know what? I’m going to miss this house. I really love it.’ And 20 minutes later, it was gone,” James Montiver said.
The couple’s home was reduced from three stories to two in a matter of seconds. They say a couch and dishwasher saved them from the slide.
The couch saved James Montiver. He says he heard rumbling and his husband scream just before the slide hit.
“It hit us and threw me out of the couch because the house actually collapsed in onto itself sideways,” James Montiver said. “Luckily, the couch had flipped over… so when the floor up above dropped on it… I had a space right here of about 18 inches clearance. So, that sofa saved me.”
He suffered a dislocated shoulder in the incident.
The dishwasher saved Bill Montiver. He was possibly electrocuted and knocked out.
“All I could tell is I was now underground, and he was above me,” Bill Montiver said. “I couldn’t move. Everything around me was flattened except …”
He became overwhelmed with emotion, so his husband picked up the story.
“The dishwasher had flipped over,” James Montiver said. “The refrigerator had flipped over and hit the dishwasher because the countertop took it and created a wedge where he was under and saved under that.”
After being rescued, the Montivers were taken to the hospital. Bill was discharged, and James was hospitalized for a couple of days.
“Without asking us, the doctors — even though they had discharged me — they said, ‘Don’t get out of bed.’ They wheeled me up to his room and said, ‘You’re welcome to stay with him as long as he’s here,’” Bill Montiver said. “[That’s] something that we had to fight our entire life with hospitals without even visitation rights.”
The couple lost everything they own in the landslide, but they are full of humor and positivity, grateful to be alive, despite losing a house they just sold and being unable to move into a new house.
“We’ve been through a lot of trials and tribulations, and we’ve been blessed so many times over,” James Montiver said. “We’ve been fortunate. We’ve been lucky. Good things have happened to us almost our entire life, along with the bad, and we just choose not to focus on the bad because it will destroy you, if you let it. We have to focus on the good.”
The Montivers are among dozens of people displaced by the landslide. Sixty homes were evacuated, and an emergency shelter was established at Ketchikan High School.
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