GJERDRUM (Dagbladet): Aud-Margaret Vamsæter Kogstad (65) woke up to everything shaking around her in the bedroom. She thought it must be an earthquake.
Then the house wall slammed open, and suddenly she was outdoors, still on the mattress, where she sailed down with the clay masses. She stuck her leg a couple of times, but managed to get loose.
– It was so absurd, on the border between reality and dream, says Kogstad to Dagbladet, one year later.
It was completely dark around her, and difficult to see. At one point she could hear cries for help, before it became quiet.
“Now we are saved”
Kogstad sat on the mattress, wearing only a nightgown, for about three hours. It was cold. She wrapped herself in the mattress topper and looked around while she waited.
– I think it took a very long time before I saw blue light, but in retrospect I have heard that it took half an hour. When I saw the helicopters that started on the other side of the area, I started waving, and realized that “now we will be rescued”.
She is still struggling to take in what she herself experienced that morning a year ago, and that ten neighbors and an unborn child lost their lives.
– I’ll never get it. Never, never, never, says Kogstad.
Aud-Margaret Vamsæter Kogstad (64) saved her life on a mattress during the landslide at Ask in Gjerdrum. Here on the family farm, one year later. Photo: Lars Eivind Bones / Dagbladet
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– I am so incredibly grateful that I was saved. It almost feels a little unfair that I should survive, while others died.
– Unfair that you should survive?
– I know I could not prevent anything, or do anything from or to. Still, I have wondered why I should live when others around me die. It’s so incomprehensible.
Sold the house: – Will not die
– Is incomprehensibly well
The 65-year-old was alone at home when the landslide hit. She lost the home and everything she owned, except the rings and the nightgown she was wearing. She has taken care of the nightgown in a coffin in the living room.
– It was so muddy and horrible, so at first I thought I should throw it away, but then I thought “no, this is history”. So I washed it and put it in a bag. At the same time, I have written the story of my huge heirloom coffin, which was found in the landslide.
Kogstad experiences that she escaped the experience safely, both physically and mentally.
– I have not lost anyone in my family. I can look ahead and live. I feel so incomprehensibly good, but it is a dark backdrop, says Kogstad.
In the weeks after the landslide, she was allowed to live with friends on Hadeland, but she quickly returned to Gjerdrum, where she has lived on the farm where she grew up since Easter.
At the beginning of February, she will finally move into a new, permanent home in a newly established apartment complex on Ask – not far from the landslide area.
– They have checked and double-checked the ground conditions, so we get to believe that it is on safe ground. I have wanted to go all the way back. It’s my village, she says.
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