6 Tales of Amazing Survivors (Who Were Babies)

Today, Aleah is a perfectly healthy teenager who says tornadoes are "cool," although she doesn't sound very impressed by them from her description: "I like how they work and how they can destroy so much but they're just wind going in a circle."

What's even worse than a tornado? An earthquake? A tsunami? How about an unholy combination of both that lasts 10 freaking minutes (we shit our pants if a tremor lasts more than five seconds) and literally shakes the whole planet? Because that's exactly what hit the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, killing 230,000 people, devastating thousands of miles of coastline on two continents -- and leaving one 20-days-old baby completely unfazed.

Thulasi Suppiah was taking a well-deserved nap after an intense morning of pooping in her diapers, some whining, and a lot of being adorable in a general baby-like fashion. That's when the tsunami hit her parents' restaurant in northern Malaysia, pushing the adults right out of the building before they could reach the baby, who slept in a bed in another room. If being rudely kicked out of your property by a massive flood of water already sucks balls, imagine how terrifying it must be when you combine it with the fact that your baby is still in there.

The worried parents managed to "claw their way back to the badly damaged building" later that day, and what they saw inside was even more impressive than the overwhelming act of nature they'd just witnessed: their baby, lying on a mattress, floating in a 5-foot pool of water.

Yes, all the furniture in the building had been abruptly rearranged by the tsunami, but little Thulasi was technically still exactly where they had left her. Had she rolled to the side, she would have fallen into the water, but thankfully the view of the ceiling proved interesting enough to stare at until her parents came back. And, although she was crying at the time they found her, we suspect that had less to do with the tsunami and more with the fact that babies are grumpy when awoken.

Now, Thulasi might very well be indestructible, but anyone would understand if, like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, she was terrified of water. Nope: The now 10-year-old loves to swim. In the ocean.

We're not sure if there's some scientific basis for this, but it appears that the babies of Melbourne, Australia, are train-proof. Seriously, how the hell else can you explain the fact that two babies in the city fell underneath trains, seven months apart, and in both cases came away with nothing more than a few minor scrapes and perhaps a newly minted turd in their pants?

Again, that baby is still in one piece.

That happened in October 2009, when a 6-month-old baby boy in a stroller rolled onto the tracks in Melbourne just as a train pulled into the station, to the shock of all present. But then, after the train stopped, workers realized that the baby was still fine underneath, with a bump on his head but otherwise in pristine condition. The baby was taken to the hospital but released the same day, presumably because his skin broke all the needles when they tried to inject him.

The fact that the baby landed at the precise spot to survive being run over by a train was a stroke of luck that could never happen again ... until May 2010, when it totally fucking did. This time, a 15-month-old baby in a stroller rolled onto the tracks, but landed in such a way that the train merely pushed it "for a short distance" without harming it. Oh, and this also happened in Melbourne.

In each instance, authorities urged parents to be careful, because they don't want to give away Australia's superhuman breeding program quite yet. Unfortunately the people of Melbourne aren't really bothered, if this 2012 video of a baby rolling onto a train track is anything to go by. That particular baby was rescued from the tracks before any trains arrived -- or rather, as it's Melbourne, the baby was removed from the railway before any trains were damaged.

While babies are particularly fragile, there are certain temperatures that should be avoided by anyone of any age who isn't wearing most of what used to be a reindeer. That's why things didn't look good for 13-month-old Erika Nordby back in 2001 when, in the early hours of the morning, she crawled out of bed and, due to a faulty door latch, was able to make her way outside. In Canada. In February. While wearing just a diaper.

Erika had been outside for at least three hours, lying in the middle of her yard at around 4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 Celsius), when her mother found her. She called the paramedics, who determined that Erika was suffering from a number of potentially fatal symptoms, like already being clinically dead. She was so cold that her lips were frozen together and it was impossible to insert a breathing tube. By the time she got to the hospital, her heart had not been beating for around two hours. She was, at that point, little more than a Popsicle shaped like a human.

In most parts of the world, when you get a baby in that condition in your emergency room, you start drawing straws to decide who's gonna give the bad news to the parents. But this was Canada, where, as one doctor put it, "We don't declare somebody dead until they're warm and dead." And so the doctors put Erika under a warming blanket, presumably out of habit, only for her body to do what scientists have called "pulling a Captain America" -- she just unfroze back to life.

Erika's heart started beating again and she was acting normally within a few days. It was described as a "one in a million chance" by her pediatrician.

An 11-year-old Erika and her mother gave an interview in 2011, and while the whole experience appears to be very emotional for her mom, Erika herself is much more nonchalant about it: "It was really cold and I walked outside," she said, glossing over the whole "and became lord of the elements" aspect. Today her tale has joined the legends of that mysterious land up north, and she even has her own folk song.

Childbirth can be a pretty shocking event to witness, as we learned from that one eighth grade health class we'll never forget. Sure, the mother gets the shittier end of the deal, but it's still a traumatic experience for those whose genitals aren't currently passing a new human being. As long as there's a head emerging from someone in your vicinity, you're probably going to struggle to concentrate.

One activity that doesn't mix brilliantly with large distractions is driving. That was unfortunate for Mokhles Raheema of Sweden, who was hurrying his wife to the hospital when their baby was born right there in the passenger seat, causing the father to take his eyes off the road to look over and witness the miracle of life. Here's a handy 3D recreation of the scene:

But, precisely because Mokhles was busy being distracted/grossed out by the sight of the baby leaving his wife's vagina and dangling upside down, he didn't notice the crash barrier he had just swerved into. The car bounced and rolled over four times, crossing two lanes of highway, until it landed in a ditch. Besides Mokhles and his wife, their previous two offspring were sitting in the back seat of the car. Mokhles says that after the crash he thought the entire family might be dead, because of course he fucking did.

Finding his wife unconscious and his two other children rattled but unhurt, Mokhles panicked when he realized his seconds-old daughter "had disappeared from sight." However, as with every time you lose something important in your car, he found what he was looking for in the most classic hiding place: underneath the passenger seat. The little indestructibaby was completely fine.

The mother had a few injuries, but the rest of the family was OK. The car itself was written off, but luckily for the parents they'd borrowed it from a friend. Presumably they'd ramped their own car into the ocean during conception or something.

Mississippi resident Michael Elliott was walking into the kitchen with his 10-month-old cousin, Oleandra, in his arms when an explosion knocked him down, along with the kitchen and the whole damn house. A gas leak had turned the entire two-story construction into a flaming pile of junk with a family trapped underneath (except the grandpa, who was -- no kidding -- ejected all the way to the neighbor's yard).

Firefighters got all of the adults out fairly quickly, but there was one little problem: No one knew where baby Oleandra had ended up. The explosion knocked her right out of Elliott's arms, and he lost track of her after that, what with the whole "having severe burns on his body" thing. All they knew was that the baby was somewhere in the house, which at this point looked like this:

To make matters worse, the only way the firefighters could remove the wreckage was by first dousing it with gallons of water -- for those of you with limited medical knowledge, "gallons" is definitely enough water to drown a baby.

At 5 a.m., after the fire department and half the neighborhood had been looking for 10 hours, they had to stop because it was raining too heavily (we should reiterate the fact that babies can drown very easily and that Oleandra's family aren't a race of amphibians). The search started again around 9:30 a.m., but obviously everyone's spirits had seen better times. It was about an hour later that they noticed something unusual: The house's basement had only half-collapsed. And in the non-collapsed part, there sat a non-charred, non-drowned baby.

It turns out that, in the best real-life demonstration of cartoon physics ever, the explosion made Oleandra fall through the floor before everything collapsed on top of her, in just such a way that it left a little gap that was both fire- and waterproof. The local residents promptly got together and raised thousands of dollars to cover Oleandra's medical bills, but we're not sure if that's because they're all kind and generous individuals or if they just think it's wise to make a good impression on the baby who's clearly got some sort of supernatural entity on her side.

Related Reading: Some stories of survival just seem too badass to be true, like this fighter pilot who flew his plane to safety while standing on the wing. And then of course there's the woman who survived a fall off the damn Empire State Building. And if all these stories weren't quite badass enough for you (somehow) you should check out the coolest survival traits ever designed by evolution.

And for more ways we underestimate children, check out 14 Things Kids Suspect About the Adult World.