Cardiff Resident Recounts Nepal Earthquake: “Most Terrifying Sound”

Cardiff resident Matt Schiavon was hiking with three others in Nepal when, suddenly, he heard the loudest and most terrifying sound he’d ever heard before.

His first instinct was that a landslide was coming, so the group began to run.

“Luckily, we were on a pretty gradual slope and it held, but to either side of us there were gorges and huge landslides were triggered immediately,” he told NBC 7 by email.

It wasn’t until the group navigated down to the town of Phedi that they realized it had been a massive earthquake.

They were safe, but it would be days before Schiavon and his girlfriend, Dawn Lightfoot, found their way out of the country.

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Schiavon and Lightfoot had set off on a trip around Southeast Asia after they wrapped up two years of teaching in South Korea.

Schiavon was in India this week and recounted to NBC 7 by email his experience during Nepal’s devastating earthquake. He and Lightfoot expect to be back in San Diego by the end of the month.

The day of the earthquake, Schiavon said when his traveling group arrived in Phedi, they discovered that the town’s only guesthouse had been destroyed. So they continued on with 12 others to a small, isolated village called Talu.

“We had to cross numerous steep landslide sections and broken ground along the way,” he wrote. “We are all extremely lucky to have made it to Talu safely.”

The villagers there took them in, offering between 30 to 40 people to sleep beneath a tarp. For the next few days, Schiavon and Lightfoot subsisted off two plates a day of rice with lentil soup, fed to them by the villagers.

At that time, Schiavon said he had no idea how they would get to Kathmandu. Trails were badly damaged. A bridge was destroyed. Cell phone service was spotty.

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The villagers “were grateful and very accommodating, but it was communicated through our guides that they were running low on food and that they couldn’t support this number of people much longer,” he wrote.

Schiavon and six others requested helicopter evacuation. But after staying in the village for four days, Schiavon said the group started losing hope of helicopter rescue.

They then decided to hike out to Kathmandu.

“Miraculously, our guide got through using a villager’s cell phone that had just arrived and received information that they were sending a helicopter for us either that same day or possibly the next,” he wrote.

So they stayed where they were and the next afternoon, they heard the sound of an incoming helicopter. That's when they were taken to Kathmandu International Airport.

From there, Schiavon and Lightfoot got on a flight to India the next day, thanks to their insurance company.

Schiavon said that while they’ve left Nepal, they have a heart for those who stayed behind to provide relief.

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A fellow traveler, Olga Becker, who was with the couple during the earthquake, stayed in Nepal and is now distributing tents and food, among other things, to those impacted by the disaster.

“She is doing great work out there and we would greatly appreciate it if you could help with her efforts,” he wrote.

You can donate to Help Nepal here.

Schiavon had a simple final message in his email: “Our thoughts are with Nepal and all the family and friends of those still missing or that have passed. Stay strong.”

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