Early in the morning of Sept. 27, David and his wife, both 43, were in bed when a tree crashed into their home. David was pinned to the bed for almost two hours. Now he's sharing his story of survival in his own words, as told to PEOPLE's David Chiu.
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00:00Literally the house is falling down around me while they were trying to rescue me.
00:08We weren't necessarily a hard-hit area. We had a lot of trees down, but we, you know,
00:12unfortunately our incident was, you know, kind of a fluke. Like I said, it was lots of down,
00:17but we weren't a hard-hit community overall, so it was kind of a
00:22kind of an oddball, you know, situation that we found ourselves in.
00:30I was sound asleep and I remember the same incident that I was coherent out of sleep.
00:40I heard the crash and felt, you know, all the, you know, just debris and the tree,
00:46the weight of the tree. So when I woke up, it was already over for me. You know, I didn't have any
00:51hope until about 7.45, the last 15 minutes of the rescue when they started lifting the tree and
00:56giving me some relief finally and getting and pulling stuff off me. That's the first time that
01:01I thought that I might actually make it out. I just remember it was, I've been sweating because
01:05I, you know, I was in a dense little box. I've been sweating, sweating. Started feeling the
01:08rain a little bit and I was like, this is the absolute best feeling ever is that rain just
01:13hitting my face. It got my body out. I could feel it all over my body and yeah, they put me in some
01:19kind of, you know, a helicopter lowers down, they put a body in it or something. Apparently I was
01:24like swinging. I mean, I knew I was swinging because it was still a gust of 50 to 60 mile
01:28per hour winds. But as soon as they got me into that and they were like moving me around, I knew
01:33that like, hey, I am in immense pain right now, but you know, I'm out and I'll be okay. Whether
01:40I got some broken bones and surgeries later, I think I'll be all right.