Stella Maris College (Montevideo) - The Andes Accident of 1972

The Andes Accident of 1972

The school gained accidental fame when its alumni rugby team flew on Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed into the Andes mountains on October 13, 1972. The story of the crash and rescue was first told in the 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors and more recently in the 2006 book Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home. The school also appeared in the documentary, Alive: 20 Years Later.

Twelve of the 45 people on board the plane died in the crash, and more died of their injuries later. Another 8 perished in an avalanche. The remaining survivors endured hunger, crash-related injuries, altitude sickness, and temperatures that fell to 30 degrees below zero at night. On their eighth day in the mountains, they heard on the radio that the authorities had stopped searching for them. When their scarce food reserves were gone, they were forced to eat those who had died in the crash.

On December 12, 3 of the remaining survivors set out to find help, hiking west across the Andes Mountains to reach Chile. After scaling the nearly 17,000-foot Mt. Seler, they realized that the trek for help would take them much longer than they had thought. Therefore, to conserve their limited food supply, one of them returned to the crash site and the other two continued hiking west.

On 21 December 1972, the ninth day of their journey, they were found by huasos who grazed livestock in the high country, and the next day, the world learned of the 16 survivors who had beaten death for 72 days in the Andes mountains, in part by resorting to cannibalism.