Couple Hits Survivor Trifecta

Nadim Everts carried her newborn son and ran for her life on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, from the apartment she and her husband Todd shared near Ground Zero.

Todd was on a plane heading home from Rochester, N.Y., when the two planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

Because that event turned their lives upside down, they decided to get a fresh start.

They picked up the pieces and moved to Hong Kong. Then came the deadly SARS epidemic. Every time someone so much as sniffled, they thought it could be SARS. Their friends were leaving. People were being evacuated. They weren't sure what to do.

They still live there, but this week, they happened to be on vacation with their young children in Phuket, Thailand, when the devastating tsunami hit. Again, they escaped with their lives. They've stayed on, to try to help other Americans find their families, and help the locals.

Nadim told Todd that, if bad things happen in threes, they are OK. They certainly hope so.

Nadim and Todd spoke with The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith Wednesday.

Todd described their latest brush with death: "We were, as parents with young kids, getting ready to go to the beach and we were running about 15 minutes late when we heard and saw people running in all different directions, and we were trying to ascertain what was going on. We saw water rising around us. …Beneath (our resort) is a Club Med and that acted as a break wall, if you will, for stopping the tsunami wave from coming right through and hitting us directly. We were very, very fortunate that the other hotel was there. Unfortunately, those people have -- were not as lucky as we were."

Todd and Nadim took photos of the scene, which they provided to CBS News on an exclusive basis. The photos are included in the video you can see by

"We were trying to remain calm and we were trying to keep our children calm. I got on the phone and was calling my brother in New York to ask him if he knew anything that was going on, because my wife and I have gone through the 9-11 event in New York, living a couple of blocks away, and then we moved to Hong Kong and we lived through the event with SARS.

"So when this was happening, and I'm kind of a tech person, I wanted to get someone online so they could do a search on the Internet. I got a hold of a friend in mine in Hong Kong who told me about 40 minutes earlier, an earthquake had happened off the coast of Indonesia, and thus, we knew it was a tidal wave.

"What we didn't know then and what we were afraid was, was there more coming? Which direction should we go, what should we do? Our hotel was evacuated and they moved us to the highest point on the island and the residents of the hotel and us, we stayed in this evacuation period for roughly six hours before the Thai government allowed us to come back to our hotel."
Nadim told Smith, "It's certainly been a very horrifying experience. …You have to be there to understand, especially a mother of three children. I just didn't know, every hour passing by, if another tidal wave is going to hit us and would we be affected, would we not be affected? We just didn't know. But I can tell you, it's just like being near the World Trade Center. You just don't know when it's going to happen again. But it's just one of those unlucky situations."

Todd says surviving all these close calls "certainly tells you how important your loved ones are and how sometimes the simple things in life are really important and are more important than the things that cause events like this.
"We feel absolutely terrible for the local people. As you may know, many of these restaurant owners and shop owners -- this is all they have. They live in the back of the restaurant. We had gone for a lunch at an Italian restaurant on Christmas day and we went back the day after and it was gone. There was no restaurant. It was just a couple of feet of rubble. And the shop owners were there just trying to clean out and they have no home, they have no business. And probably tourists won't come here for fear of another tsunami wave. And it's just a compounding effect and we feel absolutely terrible."