Best Fight for Survival

When a flash flood struck, a mother and seven kids were directly in its path.

The Downpour

This was Liz Marchand's summer to bond with her kids. She wanted to spend as many days with them as she could on Navajo Lake. The 36-year-old had left the insurance business to set up shop as a massage therapist in the resort town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where she lived with her husband, Mike, and four children -- twins Mikaela and Maria, 7; her son Austin, 6; and her stepdaughter Marissa, 15.

Things had been rough lately for Marissa. Bright and with a flair for the dramatic, the teen had begun going through a period of rebellion. She started hanging with the wrong crowd, was charged with underage drinking and ended up performing community service at a local hospital. In the process, Marissa's relationship with her parents and Liz had suffered. Gradually, an uneasy truce had developed, and now she was feeling sheepish and scrutinized, and was looking for redemption.

Navajo Lake, 35 miles long, straddles the Colorado-New Mexico border. And it was the family's favorite recreation spot. They'd been going there for more than a decade with friends to motorboat and camp.

Usually the Marchands went to the lake with their close friends the Mudrochs: Jim, Denise and their little boy, six-year-old Casey. This cloudy August 13, 2003, Liz was the only adult who could make it. With her were her four children, plus Casey, Marissa's 19-year-old friend Jenni, and the twins' friend Ivy, age 9.

At about 4 p.m., Liz chose a campsite 10 miles by boat from civilization and out of cell-phone range. They pitched their big blue dome tent in a wide, flat sandy area in a little cove. Liz and the older girls set heavy stones inside the tent to anchor it securely. Then they went motorboating and kneeboarding before settling down for dinner.

It had rained fitfully throughout the day, in little 15-minute bursts, but as night fell, Liz and the kids roasted marshmallows over the fire until a downpour drove them inside.

They had no inkling that miles away in the mountains, it was storming hard. Rain rushed through the washes, gathering force as gravity pulled it downhill until it became a debris-laden river where before there had been none.

Liz heard it coming -- a runaway train in the wilderness -- and knew what it was. She scrambled up, unzipped the door and bolted out of the tent as the water hit. "Marissa!" she screamed as cold water rushed over them and the tent began to turn on its base. "Jenni! Get out! Help me!"

The torrent pushed the tent full of kids toward the lake. Liz grabbed one of the fiberglass tent poles, and held on. Marissa and Jenni sprang through the door into the dark confusion of the sudden blast of water. They each grabbed poles and braced their feet in the silt to battle the current.

"Pull it to the left!" Liz shouted to the girls, spotting an area of higher ground a dozen feet away.

Slathered in wet mud, the three struggled together, but the stream was too much for them. It dragged the tent, now completely flattened, into the chest-deep water of the lake.

Inside, the children screamed and clung to air mattresses floating in the chaotic blackness of the tent's interior. One by one, they somehow escaped and were ushered by the girls onto dry land. All but one: little Casey, the Mudrochs' only child, who had zipped himself into a sleeping bag.

In a panic, Liz and the girls began plunging their arms into the tent, feeling for Casey. They pulled out sleeping bags, pillows, air mattresses, water jugs. No Casey. Liz dived into the claustrophobic tangled mass searching for the boy. At last she touched something -- the hair on his head. "I found him!" she blurted to the girls. Then she plunged back in, hauling up the impossibly heavy, waterlogged sleeping bag with the motionless child inside.

The girls helped her carry Casey to the shore, where the other kids were huddled and crying. "I think he's dead," Liz said in a hushed voice so the little ones couldn't hear. Yet without hesitation, she began CPR. Casey's little body was utterly still. No one was sure how long he had been underwater -- five, ten minutes. He was cold, covered with mud, lifeless.

When she had come to the campsite, Liz had beached the boat and tied it off to some rocks a few feet from the tent. Now she looked up from doing CPR and saw the boat -- their only link to civilization -- drifting in debris-laden waters 60 feet away. "Girls," Liz barked to Marissa and Jenni. "You have to take over CPR."

Jenni had been certified in the lifesaving technique two years earlier, and luckily Marissa had just completed a CPR course as part of her community service program. The two girls took over from Liz; Marissa performed chest compressions while Jenni puffed breath between Casey's cold lips. His eyes and ears were filled with mud; filthy water spewed from his mouth with each compression. It was awful, gruesome work, but no one thought of quitting.

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