- Ashley Piccirilli, 36, was at work when she suffered a freak accident
- She was rescued by paramedics after being buried for 30 minutes
- Scarily, she flatlined on the operating table
Here she shares her story in her own words.
Under the afternoon sun, I wolfed down my sanga and headed back to the construction site.
All dug up with a deep trench running down the road, it looked like a bomb had gone off.
‘I’ll be finished on this section soon,’ I yelled to my colleague sitting in an excavator, as I clambered into the 3.5-metre deep, arm’s-length wide hole.
It was August 3, 2021, and aged 32, it was my seventh day working here as a labourer.
On a temporary contract, the job was to make ends meet while I was in flight school training to be a pilot for the army.
My task was laying sewer pipes for a new home.
Working hard and dripping with sweat, I shovelled dirt around the heavy sections of pipe, packing them in tightly.
Suddenly I heard a voice.
‘Watch out,’ my workmate boomed.
‘A torrent of soil came whooshing down.’
Looking up, my eyes widened as a torrent of soil came whooshing down.
The side of the sewer trench was caving in around me…
As tonnes of dirt came crashing down on top of me, I didn’t have time to react as it covered me, slamming into my left side and pinning me against the right side of the wall.
Then everything went eerily silent and black.
Smothered below the ground, I was trapped.
Miraculously, by looking up in the nick of time, I’d opened my airways and a tiny air pocket had formed by my mouth. But unable to move to expand my lungs I only managed tiny, shallow, sporadic breaths.
Despite being buried alive, I remained strangely calm.
I don’t like this, but people saw what happened. They’ll get me out, I told myself.
Thinking about my girlfriend, Alicia, and my wonderful family, I blocked out any dark thoughts that this could be it.
I’m getting out of here alive, I reassured myself.
After what felt like an eternity, suddenly I felt hands grappling around my head and dirt being scooped away from my face.
Spluttering soil out my mouth, I flickered my eyelids and squinted in the beaming sunlight.
‘Help me,’ I uttered.
‘Hang in there,’ my workmates said, fighting hard to rescue me from my underground coffin.
When I heard the paramedics arrive, I was still submerged from the waist down in the trench.
As they worked to free me, a searing pain shot through my body and for the first time a wave of panic coursed through me.
My left clavicle was protruding under the skin at an abnormal angle.
‘I still can’t breathe,’ I wheezed.
Slowly and steadily, I was prised out and placed on a stretcher.
‘Your lungs have collapsed,’ a paramedic explained.
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In agony, I drifted in and out of consciousness as I was rushed to hospital and taken straight onto the operating table.
Bright lights flickered and a sea of bodies darted around me as a female surgeon in blue scrubs blurred into view.
‘We’re going to take care of you,’ she said.
‘Everything went black…’
I nodded, then everything went black…
Woozily coming to the next day, my mum Pamela, dad Sabino, twin Brittney, younger sisters Emily and Elysa, and Alicia were there.
‘We were told you wouldn’t make it,’ Mum sobbed.
Being buried for 30 minutes, I had suffered internal bleeding and major crush injuries, I’d been given less than a two per cent chance of surviving.
Cutting me open from belly button to boob and side to side, surgeons had worked frantically to repair and reconstruct my broken body and stem the internal bleeding.
Two four-hour life-saving operations later, it was a miracle I was alive.
‘You flatlined on the operating table,’ the lead surgeon Dr Kristina Kramer told me in the coming days, explaining she’d had my heart in her hands, pumping it manually to bring me back to life.
Thank you for saving me, I wrote on a piece of paper, unable to talk due to the tracheotomy in my throat.
My injuries included 11 broken ribs, a lacerated spleen, a huge hole in the vena cava vein leading to the heart, collapsed lungs, a crushed sternum and diaphragm, plus my liver was so badly damaged, around 15 per cent of it had to be removed.
I’d need further surgery to reset my busted clavicle after my internal injuries had time to heal.
‘I threw everything I had into my recovery.’
Determined to serve as a pilot in the army, I threw everything I had into my recovery and rehab.
One by one, as the web of tubes were removed from my back, chest, arms, nose and throat, I could sit up in bed. Then each day I’d haul myself out of bed and take wobbly, weak steps up and down the corridor on my wheelie walker, rebuilding my strength.
After 30 days in hospital, at the beginning of September 2021, I was well enough to return home.
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Recovery was slow and frustrating – I hated not being able to carry my groceries, drive my car, go for a run or to the gym. But rather than wallow and feel unlucky to have had the freak accident, instead I felt lucky to be alive.
Three months after the ordeal, I had surgery where plates, screws and pins were inserted into my clavicle.
Alicia and I married in May 2022. And, a year after the accident, I passed the gruelling fitness test to enter flight school that September.
I proudly graduated as a helicopter pilot a year after that in November 2023.
Now, four years on from being crushed, I’m forever grateful to the rescuers and the medical staff who saved my life.
I’ll never forget that freak day when my world literally came crashing down around, me, but talking about it has helped me heal and inspired me to make the most of every moment.
With Alicia by my side, and with my dream job in the army, I’m now living my best life.
I’m proof surviving the impossible is possible.
