![Pemba Tamang Pemba Tamang is carried on a stretcher after being rescued by Nepalese policemen and U.S. rescue workers from a building that collapsed five days ago in Kathmandu, Nepal on April 30, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/pemba-tamang.jpg?quality=85&w=2400)
In the wake of the devastating earthquake that struck Nepal on Saturday, the first 72 hours were the most critical for first responders to reach victims buried under the rubble. After that, experts say, the chances of survival, particularly for those with injuries, become slim.
But human beings have a remarkable capacity for clinging to life even in the direst of circumstances. Proof of that was evident Thursday, five days after the quake, when rescuers pulled a dazed 18-year-old teenager from the rubble in Kathmandu, who was unharmed enough to thank his savior when they first made contact.
“There are always miracles,” Mike Davis, a team leader for the United States Agency for International Development Disaster and Relief Team in Nepal told TIME earlier this week. Past survival stories are as sensational as they are encouraging for rescuers:
In 1995, 19-year-old Park Sung Hyun was pulled from the rubble 16 days after a department store in Seoul collapsed, killing more than 500 others. Except for a scratch, she was uninjured. “I can’t believe that this is for real,” her brother told Yonhap Television at the time.
After the 2013 collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh—which represented the deadliest non-violence-related building collapse in history—emergency responders saved Reshma Begum after being buried for 17 days. An army seargent at the time said Begum had been breathing through a pipe inside the wreckage and was not seriously injured; Begum, a seamstress who had been working on the factory’s third floor, said she had survived off of biscuits in the bags of dead colleagues and rainwater that managed to reach her.
And in 2005, a 40-year-old woman was found alive in a tiny space in the kitchen of her home in Kashmir, which collapsed in an earthquake more than two months earlier. A doctor treating her afterward called it a miracle that she had survived, apparently off of fresh air and water that reached her and remaining food in the kitchen.
Experts say that survival can depend largely on the moments after the earthquake as structures come crashing down. “The ideal situation is you have become trapped and entombed but have some sort of oxygen supply from the outside world,” Julie Ryan, then a coordinator with the International Rescue Committee, told the BBC in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Access to water and food are also crucial; the average survival time without water ranges from three to five days. According to the BBC, the United Nations usually calls off search and rescue five to seven days after a disaster. But even when the last survivors are pulled out of the wreckage, the response operations for the impoverished nation will go on.
“Search and rescue is really the first thing,” says Garrett Ingoglia, the vice president for emergency response at AmeriCares, which is sending medical aid to Nepal. “But the recovery effort is going to take years.”
See India's Rescue Operations in Quake-Devastated Nepal
![India Nepal Earthquake Indian soldiers, left, on a rescue mission to Nepal rush to board an Indian Air Force aircraft near New Delhi on April 26, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-15.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![India Nepal Earthquake Plastic containers with drinking water are loaded into an Indian Air Force aircraft headed to Nepal, at a base near New Delhi on April 26, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-2.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![APTOPIX Nepal Earthquake The shadow of an Indian Air Force aircraft carrying relief material is cast on clouds as it approaches landing in Kathmandu, Nepal, on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-16.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake Nepalese volunteers unload relief material, brought by an Indian Air Force helicopter for victims of Saturday's earthquake at Trishuli Bazar in Nepal on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-1.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake Nepalese soldiers unload relief material brought in an Indian air force helicopter for victims of Saturdayís earthquake at Trishuli Bazar in Nepal on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-5.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake Nepalese villagers watch as relief material is brought in an Indian air force helicopter for victims of Saturdayís earthquake at Trishuli Bazar in Nepal on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-8.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake Nepalese villagers injured in Saturdayís earthquake await evacuation at Trishuli Bazar in Nepal on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-13.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake Nepalese soldiers carry a wounded man on a makeshift stretcher to an Indian Air Force helicopter as they evacuate victims of Saturday's earthquake from Trishuli Bazar to Kathmandu airport in Nepal on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-7.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake Nepalese victims of Saturday's earthquake lie inside an Indian air force helicopter as they are evacuated from Trishuli Bazar to Kathmandu airport in Nepal on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-6.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake An Indian Air Force person walks carrying a Nepalese child, wounded in Saturday's earthquake, to a waiting ambulance as the mother rushes to join after they were evacuated from a remote area at the airport in Kathmandu on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-9.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake Victims of Saturday's earthquake wait for ambulances to take them to hospitals after being evacuated at the airport in Kathmandu, Nepal, on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-11.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Nepal Earthquake A man sits with a child on his lap as victims of Saturday's earthquake wait for ambulances after being evacuated at the airport in Kathmandu, Nepal, on April 27, 2015.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nepal-earthquake-rescue-aid-17.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
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Write to Noah Rayman at noah.rayman@time.com