It's a common reflection when it comes to stories of freak accidents; the day before was ordinary.
For Stuart Diver, the sole survivor of the Thredbo landslide in 1997, the lead-up to that fateful night was "just an average day". He and his wife Sally had gone to work, done their grocery shopping and collapsed into bed early.
Despite it being the middle of a particularly cold winter, Diver, who was 27 at the time, recalled their apartment being so toasty he had gone to sleep in only his boxer shorts.
"I was just sleeping normally until I heard this massive roar and I thought, initially, it was a plane flying really low down the valley which occasionally happens, the air force [would] fly helicopters up," Diver recalled.
"Then I thought it was the wind. We do get some pretty high winds in Thredbo and they roar down the valley.
"But then that didn't go away [and] I knew it was something else."
A young Stuart Diver at Thredbo Resort. ( Supplied: Thredbo Resort )
The next three minutes were catastrophic.
"That's when the building collapsed. That's when Sally died," Diver said.
"That's the bit that my mind has always struggled to deal with, that so much happened in that first three minutes, yet I was then buried for another 65 hours on top of that."
The state coroner later found a landslide was triggered when water from a leaking main saturated an embankment on the Alpine Way above the ski lodges.
The earth had given way and liquid mud, moving with such force it sounded like a freight train, ripped through two lodges, including the one the Divers were in.
He and 18 others became trapped under a twisted mess of debris.
What he wouldn't know until days after his rescue was he was the only person to survive.
Diver said a split-second decision, one he didn't make intentionally, was the reason he was pulled out alive.
"I started to hear cracking and crunching [and I thought if I could] roll off the bed, I might be able to [escape]," he told ABC iview's I Was Actually There.
"But then … all the storeys of the building were coming down on top of me.
"I got rolled back on the bed and put my head down.
"In that same instant, the back wall of our building was pushing in and it pushed the wrought iron bedhead down onto Sally and pinned her to the mattress.
"I went forward, the bedhead got pushed down, I went back. So in a split second, that's what saved my life.
Diver was plunged into darkness, surrounded by a freezing mixture of water, mud, diesel and sewage from his building and the one above it.
He described how, as the land continued to move over the next few hours, pockets of water would be released and gush down into the cavity he was in.
"I'm on my back. The roof of the building is now about three inches above my face," he said.
"I've just got a tiny little gap of maybe two centimetres against what used to be our ceiling to breathe.
"Every time [the water] would come down, I would arch my back and just try and breathe.
"It was so cold I'd think ', F**k it, I'm just going to let myself go down into the water'.
For the next 65 hours, he clung to every instinct urging him to stay alive.
Above him, rescuers were making a midnight scramble to Thredbo to survey the damage.
First light the following morning revealed a scene unlike anything first responders had witnessed before.
They were confronted with a site described as "like pick-up sticks"; where even the slightest movement of debris could cause a chain reaction and put the lives of rescuers and anyone still trapped at risk.
The landslide resulted in one ski lodge sliding down the hill into another. ( ABC )
Metres below, Diver was entombed in "total cave darkness" — something he said was one of the hardest parts of his ordeal.
Initially, he yelled out in the hopes someone above would hear him.
"No-one was answering, so all it did was reinforce what a shit situation I was in," he recalled.
Even as his anxiety around being rescued grew, he said it was "incredible" what the mind was capable of.
"Your body just goes, 'OK, if I can live for another minute in this cold, then I've got a chance of living', and so that's all I did," Diver said.
"It was really all about self-preservation for those first few hours because I was thinking they're going to come and get me.
"They're obviously going to get me quickly, that'll be fine because there's no way I'm going to survive more than a couple of hours down here."
But as those first couple of hours passed, he started thinking about what he could do to combat the freezing cold.
Remembering he had thrown a fleece jacket on the end of his bed, Diver recalled how he spent hours and "huge amounts of frustration" slowly getting it up and around his body.
"I finally got it zipped up … it was soaking wet, covered in mud, and then I start thinking, 'F**k, maybe I've done the wrong thing," he said.
"But as the hours then progressed, it started to dry out."
Above him, rescuers worked day and night to delicately remove the rubble and search for those trapped. ( ABC )
While the jacket meant his top half was relatively warm, Diver's legs and feet were still exposed and began to ache from the cold — something he said kept him awake and alive.
Perhaps surprisingly, anger also kept him going.
"I was pissed because I was just going, 'How can it be taking this long [to rescue me]?'
"Then I'd revert back and go, 'Wait, that's a bit selfish mate. There are a lot of people in all the apartments above you. They're getting all of them.'"
Beyond the pain and anger, there was something greater pushing Diver on.
"The main driver was that Sally had died and I wanted to get out and tell her mum about what had happened," he said.
"I didn't want her mum to not know what had happened to her daughter."
Two days in, that hunger to survive waned.
Diver didn't know it then, but over the course of the nearly three days stuck underground, he had lost around 15 kilograms.
"I'm starting to think, 'F**k this, I'm done' … I'm feeling very lethargic, very tired. I'm at that absolute lowest ebb."
Diver was trapped metres below rescuers, under slabs of concrete. ( ABC TV )
Above, his rescuers were painstakingly making their way through the rubble, identifying and removing the bodies of victims as they went.
As his body dealt with the physical toll of his situation, Diver's mind began to wander, with "incredible hallucinations" transporting him to warm, sunny and dry places.
"I was right at the end [of a hallucination] and I hear this voice as clear as day, 'Rescue party overhead, can you hear me?'
"I don't know whether I'm dreaming, whether this is a hallucination or whether it's real, so I don't say anything.
"And then they say it again and I go, 'Yes, I'm here.'
"I think we were both in as much shock as each other."
After 51 hours of searching, the news of a survivor in the rubble swept through the rescue party, watching crowds and the Thredbo community.
Despite the dire physical situation he was in, the contact was the adrenaline kick Diver needed.
It would take rescuers another 14 hours, however, to get him out. It was such a precarious operation that, even until the very end, there was no guarantee he would survive.
"When you think you're going to get out in the first 10 minutes, as the hours went on, the doubt started to come into my mind," Diver recalled.
After the rescue team made it into the cavity where Diver was trapped, they put an intravenous drip into his ankle to start moving warm fluid through his body.
But there were still grave concerns about what would happen when they moved him out.
"They thought that all of the toxins in my feet, it's like a [crush] injury, they thought if they put me vertical, those toxins were going to just shoot up into my heart, bang, heart attack, possibly dead," he said.
"The terror is that you're so close. I knew that I was so close to being rescued, but I still may not get out. That was the fear."
Shortly before Diver was extracted, he was given a mobile phone to speak to his dad. He assumed it was a kind gesture and he'd be "headed to the pub" with him in minutes.
After 65 tortuous hours, Diver was pulled from the wreckage.
"The moment that I came out, I could hear the roar of the crowd," he recalled.
His visit to the pub, however, had to wait as he was taken to Thredbo Medical Centre and later airlifted to Canberra Hospital.
Diver admitted the "euphoria" of his rescue drowned out the darker reality of his situation.
"I wasn't feeling the true physical pain of what I was in and I definitely wasn't feeling any of the emotional pain that was about to come," he said.
It wasn't until his second day in hospital that his dad revealed to him that he was the only person who survived.
"They didn't want to obviously overwhelm me," Diver said.
Rescuers and paramedics were shocked at how unscathed Diver was after he was pulled from the rubble. ( ABC )
In the wake of his rescue, Diver grappled with that loneliness, and survivor's guilt. He also struggled to cope with the intense public interest.
"The biggest burden that I had during that whole period was the fact that I survived, but 18 other people died," Diver said.
"I knew that everything that I did, every time I was going to put my face on television, every time I was going to talk about what happened to me, that was going to bring up the memories and the trauma of the deaths of those 18 other people.
"That was a huge amount of responsibility for a 27-year-old to have."
Diver said his approach was to "try and be positive" in the interviews he did. It was a costly decision.
"I was always trying to make sure that despite my own personal trauma, I was painting a picture of, 'You can go on, you can get through something like this'," he said.
"That was a deliberate choice by me to do that and I paid the price for it.
He said he knows some people found him "clinical" and lacking emotion in the first interviews after the rescue.
"I did those interviews and then I went and cried in the shower for three hours," he said.
"They took an enormous toll on me but … I made a conscious decision not to sit on national television and bawl my eyes out because I've only got five minutes and in those five minutes I don't want to waste 60 seconds crying."
Diver didn't shy away from acknowledging the extensive and ongoing work he continues to do with his psychologist to live a fulsome life after what he experienced.
But he was clear his goal has always been to "get back to my normal life".
"I didn't want to be famous. I didn't want to be in the media," he said.
"I do want to be in Thredbo because life is so much more intricate than a building that fell down.
"It is so much more than the material things that I lost or about the building. It's about the people.
"And if I'm close to where Sally was, if I'm close to those memories, it inspires me to live my life rather than being the other way around."
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