Thousands of tonnes of earth and debris slid down the hillside, smashing into a four-storey ski club, which then hit the Bimbadeen Staff Lodge.
Eighteen people died in the darkness and freezing cold.
The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald the day after the landslide. (new)
Several hours down the road, a 21-year-old radio journalist was fast asleep, after a farewell drink with his colleagues in Canberra.
“I was fast asleep when I got a phone call suggesting I get to Thredbo as soon as possible,” Ben Fordham told nine.com.au.
“I didn’t have any information as to why I had to get there, but I was told there were loads of emergency services vehicles heading to Thredbo.”
Having drunk too much to drive, Fordham started a “crazy ring” for someone who could drive. Finally, he and three other people got into a car and made the trip early in the morning.
Ben Fordham was a 21-year-old journalist based in Canberra when the Thredbo landslide happened. (Ben Fordham)
A police blockade kept all media out of Thredbo.
But Fordham managed to get in before all the other reporters, by telling a police officer he was heading for higher ground for better cell phone reception.
From there he sprinted into the darkness, to be picked up by a local who was waiting for him.
“When the sun came up the next morning, I was the only reporter there who could describe what we were seeing,” Fordham said.
“It was surreal because it didn’t look real. It looked like the kind of thing you’d see in a movie.
“It looked like a giant trampled down the side of a mountain. And you could tell there were chalets and other buildings and vehicles that had all been damaged and evicted.”
Ben Fordham was just 21 when he was sent to cover the Thredbo landslide. (Ben Fordham)
Emergency services were frantically trying to determine how they could begin searching for possible survivors without triggering another landslide.
“I think what I found most difficult was the concept that there were people under all that rubble,” Fordham said.
“It seemed to me that there was no way in the world that anyone could survive.”
Rescue workers sifting through debris after the Thredbo landslide. (Dean Sewell)
It was a deeply distressing experience for a 21-year-old journalist, along with the community and family or friends of the victims.
“It was absolutely terrifying to think of people sleeping soundly in the middle of the night, lying next to their loved ones.
“And then God knows what happened next. They must have heard a noise. The ground must have started moving. And the next thing you know, their lives were gone.”
The media was kept at a distance while the excavation took place, but Fordham recalled what he saw through the lens of a camera.
“I remember seeing a body moving, and it was clear to me that the body was frozen stiff,” he said.
“So there was no way in the world in my mind that anyone was going to make it out alive.”
Later that day, an older reporter from 2UE had arrived, and Fordham thought it was time for him to leave.
“I was probably going through a bit of trauma, to be honest,” he said.
“God knows what the friends and families involved were going through.”
In a phone call that night, Fordham’s father urged him to stay in Thredbo.
“I said they’re taking out frozen bodies. There’s nobody alive down there. And I think I should go,” Fordham said.
The next morning, Fordham woke up early and turned on the local radio station.
A thumbs up from rescuers offered a sign that someone was alive in the rubble. (Dallas Kilponen)
A local politician had called to report that noises had been heard under the wreckage.
Fordham called Sydney and broke the news to the nation.
“My boss called me and said, ‘You better be right about this,'” he said.
“There is nothing worse than false hope.
“I remember having this horrible, empty feeling about the possibility that the noise underneath could have been created by something else.”
Rescuers extricate Stuart Diver from the debris of the Thredbo landslide. (Nick Moir)
When Fordham arrived at the command post, he was told what had happened at 5.37am that morning.
The diver was unharmed by the landslide, trapped between three slabs of concrete.
His wife Sally Diver, who had been sleeping next to him, had become trapped under the head of the bed in a depression. When the depression filled with water overnight, he drowned.
Stuart Diver was right by his wife’s side, but his desperate efforts to save her were unsuccessful.
He spent the next two and a half days under the rubble in his underwear, with freezing water gushing out.
Sixty-five hours after the landslide, Diver was saved, only suffering from frostbite.
Stuart Diver and was pulled from the rubble three days after the landslide. (Provided by: SCAT Paramedics)
“We need to remember so many people who lost their lives and so many families were heartbroken that day,” Fordham said.
“But I think you would all understand the joy we all felt when we realized Stuart was going to get out of there.”
Fordham would win a Walkley Award and a Raward that year for his coverage of the Thredbo landslide, the youngest journalist to do so.
But the impact of covering so much devastation stayed with him.
“A few months later, I was sitting in the pub in Sydney with some mates and then they all left to hit the dance floor,” he said.
“I was sitting there by myself and I started crying.
“I think that’s the first time I allowed myself to understand what I had seen and what I had experienced because at that point you’re in the middle of it, you don’t really get a chance to sit back and take it all in.
“And I was just an observer. So God only knows what it would have been like for the families and friends of those involved, let alone Stuart.”
It was later determined that leaking water pipes softening the ground had caused the landslide.
Hundreds of sharks head towards the castaways