Fremd grad shares story of being in Nepal when quake hit

Sitting on the airplane, waiting for his delayed flight out of Katmandu, Nepal, former Inverness resident Dean Tatooles stood up to get something out of the overhead bin when the plane suddenly jolted forward.

“I thought maybe the pilot hit the throttle by accident,” said Tatooles, the son of Inverness Village President Jack Tatooles. “The plane started to rock back and forth violently and started bouncing up and down off the pavement. The airplane's wings were flapping like a bird. We looked out of the window and we saw all of the planes lined up with their wings flapping like that. And we looked up into the foothills and saw big clouds of dust from things collapsing. It was like something out of the movies.”

Tatooles didn't realize it at the time, but he was in the midst of a catastrophic earthquake in Nepal Saturday that killed more than 4,000 people and destroyed many historic buildings, some of which he'd just visited.

Libertyville resident Alexandra Gaulin and Chicago resident Chris Mundy also were on the flight. They'd been with Tatooles on a 17-day travel photography tour of India and Nepal run by his company, Southern Cross Galleries Photo Safaris.

“You see the news stories and go, 'We were standing right there.' Or, 'We were eating lunch right there,' and you can't believe it,” said Gaulin, 23, who was on her first trip out of the country. “I'm so sad and heartbroken, because it's such a poor country, but so rich with life and love and happiness. Knowing they don't have resources like we do, it's hard to imagine how they're going to rebuild.”

After the quake hit, the passengers on their Jet Airways flight were instructed to stay on the plane and were fed a meal. Mundy, a veteran traveler, stayed calm — helping flight attendants collect food trays and joking with fellow passengers that this was his first earthquake, too, and they'd all get through it together.

The pilot announced that aftershocks were expected, so they needed to evacuate the plane. About 100 passengers all sat on the tarmac for the next 2½ hours with their luggage, feeling the ground shake from time to time and watching U.S. and Indian C-130 military planes fly overhead, presumably on their way to help.

“We just sat with our bags ... in three or four instances, the ground was shaking below us while we were sitting on the pavement. That was the scariest part. We didn't know what was going to happen next, so we were kind of terrified,” Gaulin said. “But I felt like we were in the safest place possible, because there was nothing around us.”

The air traffic controllers had left the tower, and Tatooles feared they might close the airport indefinitely. So he encouraged the pilot to figure out a way to get the plane in the air as soon as possible.

The Katmandu airport opened for a brief, 30-minute window, allowing a few commercial planes to take off, including theirs.

“Next thing you know, we're in the air and looking down at all of the devastation,” Tatooles said. “I didn't even think about if the plane was safe to fly (after the extreme jolting). I just knew we couldn't stay.”

Tatooles, a Fremd High School alumnus who now lives in Wicker Park, is a commercial real estate attorney with Levin Ginsburg in Chicago and runs the photography and tour company on the side. He said his group took thousands of photos of places leveled by the earthquake, such as Kathmandu's bustling Durbar Square marketplace.

“My group took some of the last pictures of those temples that are hundreds of years old, and stood for centuries, that are no longer,” he said.

Back at work in his law office Monday, Tatooles said the gravity of the tragedy is starting to set in and he had trouble sleeping Sunday night, his first night home.

“I'm still shaken up,” he said. “It's an ordeal for me. I am back in the real world, and I try to sit here and digest what happened over the past few days, and it's surreal.”

Mundy, a Chicago residential real estate broker, said members of the group immediately checked on the welfare of their guides and others still in Nepal, and everyone's OK. Some communicated using a “safety button” app that spread the word that they were safe on social media.

Gaulin, an aspiring photographer with a pet sitting business — who starts a new job Monday as a kennel technician with Lake County Animal Control — said she is thinking about doing some sort of charity project using her Nepal photos to help the recovery.

She's been thinking nonstop about the people of Nepal and imagining what it must have been like for them in the tiny villages, or for anyone driving on the cliffside roads, which were dangerous even before the earthquake.

“You think 'what if.' What if we didn't have an early flight? What if we were still in the mountains?” she said. “I feel like I was spared, so I want to give back and help any way I can.”

Mundy said the Nepalese are wonderful, simple and endearing people, and he fears people will grow tired of the story and move on, leaving the earthquake victims to find ways to cope.

“I don't want this to turn into another Haiti,” he said. “I don't want people to forget that they need help.”