By Colleen Mastony
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — The rescuers dug until their fingers bled. They dug with shovels and buckets and their bare hands. But they found no trace of the boy who had been swallowed by the dune.
There was no shoe, no hat, no T-shirt. Just a mountain of sugar-fine sand that stretched as far as the rescuers could see, ran through their fingers and collapsed into any hole they were able to make.
The firefighters and police officers who responded to the call of a boy buried in the sand at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore on that hot July afternoon felt sure that, as the minutes turned to hours, 6-year-old Nathan Woessner was most certainly dead.
When they finally found him, nearly four hours into the search, the child was 11 feet below the surface of the dune. His body was limp, and his skin was cold. His eyes were glazed and open. According to multiple first-responders, he had no pulse.
But as the boy was being transported from the dune in the bed of a lifeguard pickup truck, paramedic Elmer “Buddy” Kasinger saw something that stopped him: blood beading on top of the boy’s blond head.
“Ray,” Kasinger recalled asking his partner, “are you bleeding?”
Kasinger saw more blood and realized it was the child who was bleeding. That meant his heart was beating. Kasinger could barely believe what he saw next. The boy moved his mouth as if trying to take a breath. He looked, Kasinger would later say, like a fish out of water, slowly gasping for air.
Kasinger fixed an oxygen mask on the child’s face.
“Get us to the ambulance!” Kasinger called out.
Nathan Woessner was alive.
Today, people call the events of July 12, 2013, “the Miracle on Mount Baldy.”
Those who were there recounted their experiences in interviews with the Chicago Tribune. What they witnessed, they say, has changed their lives forever.
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It was the first day of a long weekend vacation to Michigan City, Ind.
The Woessners had come to this cozy beach community of 30,000 people, 60 miles east of Chicago, with their four children — the third of whom was Nathan, a lanky, buzz-cut, blue-eyed boy who was about to start first grade.
Along with another family — friends from church — the Woessners settled in at a campsite and around 1 p.m. headed for the nearby Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where 15,000 acres of pristine and isolated parkland hugs the shoreline.
They parked their cars in a small lot and hiked along a sandy path that cut through the woods and opened up to a breathtaking vista of Lake Michigan.
The sun shone in a clear blue sky as the families laid their towels and blankets to face the lake. Behind them stood Mount Baldy, an enormous, 100-acre sand dune that stood 120 feet tall, as high as a 12-story building.
Around 3:45 p.m., the fathers and two of the boys, Nathan and Colin, set off to hike Mount Baldy.
They had climbed halfway — the two dads ahead and the boys tramping behind — when Colin yelled that Nathan had fallen in a hole. Nathan’s father, a 30-year-old tire salesman, turned back, thinking that this was typical boyish mischief. As he walked down the dune, however, he saw something strange: a perfectly round, foot-wide hole in the sand.
He dropped to his knees and heard his son crying for help.
“Get me out! I’m scared!” Nathan yelled.
Nathan’s father could hear the terror in his boy’s voice. He tried to calm Nathan. “We’re coming. We’ll get you out. Don’t be scared,” he said. The boy sounded like he was so close. But the hole was dark, and his father couldn’t see anything.
The two men dug furiously and yelled for Colin to run to the beach and tell someone to call the police.
Then, the sand collapsed.
In an instant, the hole was gone, and so was Nathan.
They could no longer hear his cries.
All that was left was a blanket of sand.
At the bottom of the towering dune stood Nathan’s mother, Faith, a 33-year-old nurse. When Colin came running down and told her what had happened, she was confused and alarmed.
“Take me to him, Colin,” she said.
The boy took off like a rocket, and Nathan’s mother struggled to keep up. In her bare feet and black one-piece bathing suit, she tried to run, but the dune was steep, the sun was hot and the soft sand slowed her every step.
She was gasping for breath when her husband, Greg, ran down to meet her.
His face was gray, and he was covered in sand and sweat. She could see the fear and panic in his eyes.
“He’s gone,” he said, catching her in his arms. “He’s gone.”
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For decades, park officials and geologists knew that the sands of Mount Baldy were shifting.
A colossal dune dotted with small stands of grass, Mount Baldy is one of dozens of huge dunes on the southern edge of Lake Michigan, an area that boasts some of the largest freshwater coastal dunes in the world.
Those dunes began to form thousands of years ago when the lake level dropped dramatically. Over the centuries, they grew larger, fed by winds and waves that travel from the north and deposit tons of sand at the southern edge of the shoreline.
Until about 150 years ago, nature dictated how the sand moved along the shore and over the dunes. But industrialization and development changed that.
First came the Michigan City harbor, which was built in the 1860s. That prevented sand from moving along the shoreline, starved the beach of sand and halted the formation of small dunes that would typically protect Mount Baldy from wind and waves.
Then came the tourists who trampled over the dune and killed its natural grasses. Buffeted by winds off the lake and stripped of the grass that would normally hold the sand in place, the once stable Mount Baldy had, by the 1940s, morphed into a strange phenomenon: a moving sand dune.
It moved slowly at first, just 3 or 4 feet a year. Then, over the past decade especially, it began to accelerate, shifting as many as 20 feet in a single year. Scientists believe that over the past 70 years, the dune has moved 400 feet — a distance longer than a football field.
It took on a U-shape, with arms that reached toward the lake and a curved front that advanced on the land. As it moved, it swallowed everything in its path, covering up walking trails, trees and at least one beach cottage.
All of those factors were well-known to park officials and scientists at the moment Nathan went for a walk on that sunny July day.
What no one realized was that something else was happening in the sands of Mount Baldy: Strange holes were forming and vanishing. But the holes hadn’t drawn much notice until Nathan disappeared into one of them.
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The first responder on the scene, Michigan City police Officer Greg Radiger shoved a white plastic pipe into the spot where the dune had gobbled up Nathan.
Soon, 20 men and women were working in shifts, moving the sand as fast as they could. Firefighters, police, beachgoers and even a reporter for the local paper all worked together. When one would tire, another would jump in.
Still, there was no sign of Nathan.
“There wasn’t a hole in the sand, there wasn’t even a dimple,” said Brad Kreighbaum, 36, a firefighter who was among the first on the scene. “There was nothing. We were just digging in nothing. Just digging and digging.”
Time passed, and some men began to raise doubts about whether the child was in the sand at all. Police officials ordered teams to scour the woods and the beach.
Then, more than an hour into the search, a LaPorte County sheriff’s deputy called out: “I found a hole!” Someone grabbed a flashlight and illuminated a round hole that appeared to stretch down at least 20 feet. That discovery brought the realization that the child could have fallen deeper than anyone had imagined.
They needed to move more sand, and a lot faster than they could by hand.
Michigan City is a small town, where everyone seems to know everyone. The police chief dialed his cellphone.
“Ryan,” the chief said, “how fast can you get one of your machines here?”
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At 6 p.m., an 8-ton yellow backhoe crept up the side of Mount Baldy. Earlier attempts to bring in heavy equipment had failed. The slope was too steep, so the chief had called Ryan Miller, 35, who worked in construction his entire life.
Miller drove the backhoe in reverse, using the machine’s bucket to grab the hill ahead, like a giant arm that helped to pull the backhoe up the dune.
By now, the rescuers had successfully dug a 5-foot pit into the side of the dune. When the backhoe made it up the dune, the pit was cleared of all but a few men.
The mood was tense as the men probed the dune with metal rods. Then they signaled for the backhoe to scrape off a foot of sand. Everyone knew that if the machine dug too deep, it could rip the boy in half.
Two big excavators arrived an hour later. At the controls of one was Josh Zimmer, 36, who was said to be so deft that he could pick a sheet of paper off the ground with the bucket of his mammoth machine.
It was shortly before 8 p.m., the sun was dipping toward the lake and the daylight was beginning to die, when a heavy-equipment operator noticed a slight discoloration in the sand.
The man plunged his 5-foot probe into the sand, hit something and then signaled to Kreighbaum, the firefighter.
A powerfully built man who stood 6 foot 4, Kreighbaum dropped to his knees, pushed his long arm into the sand and, with his fingers, touched the top of Nathan’s head.
Kreighbaum could feel the side of the boy’s face and his ear.
“Brother, you got him,” he said.
Silence swept over the dune.
The men found the child in a standing position, as if he had fallen feet-first into a long, narrow pipe. Someone cautioned them to proceed slowly. But, once they uncovered Nathan’s shoulders, Kreighbaum simply grasped the child under his arms and pulled him out.
Nathan was cold and limp.
Kreighbaum felt sure the boy was gone, but he spoke to him tenderly.
“It’s OK,” Kreighbaum whispered, wiping the sand off Nathan’s face and cradling him. “We got you now. You’re going to be all right.”
The boy reminded him of his own son. For a moment, Brad Kreighbaum didn’t want to let Nathan go.
“Brad,” another man said.
At the bottom of the pit that had been dug into the dune, Kreighbaum and the others strapped the child to a board, secured his neck with a brace and handed him from one man to the next until Nathan was on the beach. No one spoke as the men laid the boy in the back of a lifeguard pickup truck, which began bouncing over the sand and toward a waiting ambulance.
On the dune, as a sunset washed the horizon with color and light, three dozen rescuers — exhausted and covered with sand and sweat — sat down in groups or on their own. They guzzled water, or poured it on their heads, or stared at the lake. Kreighbaum walked off by himself. All of them believed that Nathan was dead.
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The paramedic who tended to Nathan in the lifeguard pickup truck burst into the private room at Franciscan St. Anthony hospital, where Nathan’s parents waited for news of their son.
“He’s alive,” said Buddy Kasinger.
As Nathan was taken away from the dune in the pickup truck, a cut on his head had begun to bleed. The boy’s pulse had come back, his pupils had started to dilate, and he had begun to whimper.
Nathan’s parents could see the paramedic’s amazement.
Soon, the couple — barefoot and wearing T-shirts and shorts over their bathing suits — were led to the emergency room.
There they found nurses and doctors working intensely on their son. Nathan was sedated, covered in sand, with a deep cut on his cheek, a brace on his neck and a tube down his throat. But his mother could think only of how beautiful he looked.
When Nathan had arrived at the hospital, he had moaned, “Mommy, Mommy.”
Now, his mother gently stroked his hair and whispered: “Mommy’s here.”
That night, a helicopter airlifted Nathan to Comer’s Children’s Hospital in Chicago, where tests quickly showed that he had escaped the ordeal without any apparent brain damage.
When doctors lifted Nathan’s sedation — about three days after his arrival at the hospital — he was weak and agitated. Sand was everywhere, lodged under his fingernails and toenails, in his mouth and nose, and coming out his ears. Nurses suctioned most of the sand out of his lungs. Within a few days, he was talking and walking again. Before long, he was happily painting, playing video games and sending a remote control car racing down the hospital corridors.
By the time he was cleared for release from Comer, 11 days after the accident, he seemed back to normal. The biggest concern was that he would be traumatized by what had happened.
Yet — in one final gift — it appeared to his parents and his doctor that he had no memory of being buried alive.
Later, his parents would try to gently explain to Nathan what had happened. They showed him some television news clips, but they were certain that he didn’t grasp the magnitude of what had happened.
In truth, most people struggled to understand what had happened.
Doctors believed that Nathan must have had access to air while he was trapped under the sand. How that occurred exactly, no one was able to figure out.
“What is surprising to me is that you can be buried in 11 feet of sand and have enough of an air pocket to oxygenate your brain,” said Dr. Rachel Wolfson, who oversaw Nathan’s care at Comer. “I’m not a good geologist. My understanding with sand is that it fills all available spaces.
“There must have been an air pocket. If he hadn’t had an air pocket, he would have been dead.”
About a month after the accident, the Woessners drove from their home in Sterling, Ill., back to Michigan City for a quiet reunion. The firefighters pulled the red aerial truck onto the driveway of the fire station.
The men didn’t ask Nathan questions or try to talk to him about what had happened. They simply boosted him into the driver’s seat of the big fire truck and let him be a boy.
“I let him steer and put the ladder as far up as it would go and pull all the levers and blow the horn and turn on the siren,” said Kreighbaum, the firefighter who had pulled Nathan from the dune. “I let him do it all.”
Nathan didn’t just survive, he appeared to be a perfectly normal child, with spiky hair and a big toothy grin. Except for a V-shaped scar on the crown of his head where someone hit him with a shovel during the desperate search, he appeared to have escaped without much more than a few scratches.
Watching Nathan in the fire truck that day, the men felt a sense of wonder and awe.
“It was so surreal that he was even alive,” Kreighbaum said. “To see him walking and smiling and seemingly perfect, I think every one of us had some tears rolling down.”
Like many of the first responders, the Woessners believed that Nathan’s survival was a miracle.
But they were also worried about their son. They sent him to a counselor for two months; the woman eventually said the sessions were no longer necessary. Nathan didn’t seem to experience any nightmares or flashbacks.
One evening, as Nathan and his father were opening get-well cards that had poured in from around the country, Nathan asked what had happened that July day. His father explained and Nathan listened. After that, he never asked about the accident again.
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Nathan’s parents were happy to allow the boy to move on. They let him play video games and catch frogs and go back to school. They even took a recent trip to a beach, where Nathan showed no sign of being upset. He built sandcastles and buried his feet.
In quiet moments, Nathan’s mother pulls him close.
“I like holding him, and feeling his skin against me, and smelling him. It sounds silly, but he has that little boy smell,” she said. “I like to just look at him. I do that a lot. I have to remind myself not to stare at him. I’m so happy to have him, that God let me have him back.”
Today, Mount Baldy is closed. Wooden barricades — hung with a red-and-white sign that reads AREA CLOSED HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS — block the access road that leads to the dune.
Researchers have found six additional holes, which seem to form and vanish within 72 hours. Some of the holes are small — just a few inches across — but one found in August was the diameter of a basketball and 4 feet deep.
Ground-penetrating radar machines have crisscrossed the dune to map its internal structure. But after more than a year of study, researchers have not been able to unravel the mystery.
How does a little boy emerge alive after being buried for so long? Nathan was completely encased in sand, rescuers say, with no apparent access to air that anyone could see.
“It doesn’t matter if you go to church, it doesn’t matter what your beliefs are,” said Kreighbaum, the firefighter who pulled Nathan from the dune. “Every single card had to fall into place that day, and the fact that they did is a true miracle.”
The rescuers know the sand can be dangerous. A 9-year-old girl died on an Oregon beach in August after a hole she had dug collapsed and buried her for just five minutes.
Over the last year, the police and firefighters have kept in touch with Nathan. They say they want to see the boy grow up and graduate high school. They want to see what he does with his second chance.
“For God to bring this child back,” said Kasinger, the paramedic who treated Nathan in the lifeguard pickup truck. “It makes me wonder what’s going to happen in Nathan’s life and what kind of difference he’s going to make in the future for somebody else.”
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