South African Andrew Brown gave his little daughter Frankie “zero chance of survival” after a 10-metre wave crashed over his family on a tiny Thai island. Now the family is savouring a miraculous New Year gift of life.
The 18-month-old daughter, her parents and their nurse Vicky had barely laid down their towels on uninhabited Hong island off Thailand’s Andaman coast when their tropical paradise was turned upside down by a killer tsunami.
“The sky was a beautiful blue, the sea was just a mirror, not an ounce of wind. It was the most fantastic day in paradise that you could imagine… and then I saw a roll of water coming towards me at a hell of a speed,” Andrew Brown said on Friday, recounting the moment he realised his family was in mortal danger.
Within seconds, “this 10-metre wave took me with it and broke right on my family and other families. It was a hell of a wave and it took us under water through the jungle for about 50 metres,” the Johannesburg native said.
“She had zero chance of survival. People were strewn all over this island, and my wife couldn’t hold on to our baby in that force.”
Frankie was saved from certain death by her quick-thinking nurse Vicky, who reached out a hand to grab hold of the toddler before she was swept back out to sea.
The impact separated them all and in the aftermath Brown feared the worst. But when he found Vicky and his daughter virtually unscathed, he was dumbstruck.
“It was like being hit by a bus at 200 kilometres per hour and coming out without a scratch. The only explanation is, God blessed us.”
Brown said the massive wave left utter devastation along the shallow Hong coast — about 20 people lay dead on the beach or floating in the now-muddy water. Trees were uprooted and the boats which brought them to the island were a tangle of splinters.
The family and other tourists managed to climb up the sides of limestone hills framing the picturesque beach, panicked in the expectation of even bigger waves. But they never came and five hours later they were rescued.
Brown’s wife Joanne broke vertebrae in her back and was recovering in a Bangkok hospital.
Thailand was among several Asian countries decimated by tsunamis that raced across the Indian Ocean after being triggered by Sunday’s massive earthquake off Indonesia. More than 125 000 are confirmed dead, including 4 541 in Thailand. About half the dead in Thailand are foreign holidymakers.
Andrew and Joanne Brown had been to Thailand before, spending their honeymoon on Samui island which escaped the waves.
Brown said they wanted to try something different when they brought their daughter to the Andaman coast.
12 South Africans still missing
Two South Africans are missing in Myanmar and 10 in Thailand following killer waves in southern Asia, says the foreign affairs department.
Two people previously listed as missing in India and four people in Thailand have been located alive, foreign affairs spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said.
The government has charged its inter-ministerial disaster management committee with co-ordinating South Africa’s relief efforts to countries in Africa and southern Asia affected by Sunday’s killer tsunami.
The committee headed by Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi included the departments of foreign affairs, water and forestry, health and social development, Mamoepa said.
The committee would meet on Monday to consider proposals for relief made by senior government officials.
The department of home affairs said on Friday it had processed 18 passports and six identity books for South Africans who lost their documents in the tsunami in Thailand.
Tsunami survivors returning from Phuket on Wednesday applied for new documents at a special home affairs office set up at Johannesburg International Airport.
Spokesperson Nkosana Sibuyi said the department was also able to speedily process a passport for the fiance of a woman whose father and brother are still missing in Phuket, Thailand.
Leslie Dewit’s fiance, Antoni van Wyk, planned to travel to Thailand to search for Bevan and Louis Panaino.
The department would deliver the outstanding documents to their owners on Friday.
Sibuyi said the department’s helpdesk at Johannesburg International Airport set up to assist South Africans returning from the disaster in southern Asia was operating smoothly.
Battle to reach survivors
Survivors of the tsunami in the battered Indonesian province of Aceh expressed frustration with the slowness of aid efforts as emergency workers struggled with a logistical nightmare.
In the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, rotting bodies and piles of debris continued to clutter the streets, with the local government in disarray. Officials were burying dead bodies by the truckload, but they lacked the manpower to dig them all out and transport them to mass graves.
Sunday’s earthquake and the resulting tsunami struck the province of Aceh the hardest of all areas around the Indian Ocean. Aceh, a province in northern Sumatra, has a population of around 5-million. It lay closest to the epicentre of the quake.
The Indonesian health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, said the death toll in Aceh was likely to rise above 100 000. The number of confirmed dead is 79 940.
“It will take at least two weeks for us to have the people and equipment we need here,” Aigor Lacomba, of a consortium of European aid groups, told the Reuters news agency. “It means nothing to bring a whole lot of staff if you have no where for them to live.”
There were few indications of coordinated aid distribution in Banda Aceh and its suburbs. Handwritten signs stuck everywhere on poles and fences said: “Please help. Give us aid.”
Eddy, 50, a teacher whose school was destroyed in the tsunami, complained that people with little or no money left had to pay for fuel.
“Why do we have to pay? It should be free after this disaster. What is wrong with the government?” he said.
At one of the only two open gas stations cars backed up for more than a mile, watched by police with automatic weapons. Hundreds of people stood in queues carrying jerry cans.
“It’s taking too long to get petrol. The police are there. Otherwise there would be violence. Tell the world we need more fuel. Look at this queue,” said Zezi Afrizal, 26, a food vendor.
Others urged authorities to open more fuel outlets.
“We need the fuel badly. Our family wants to go to Medan. We have so many children we’re afraid of disease,” said Rizal, 30, driving a black van.
In the fishing village of Meulaboh, whole swaths of land were stripped bare, with only some home foundations and debris remaining. About a quarter of the town’s 40 000 people were feared dead, but only a fraction of that number had been found.
While supplies were arriving in Banda Aceh, they were piling up at the airport because of the difficulty of distribution. At the main airport, Australian and Singaporean crews unloaded military C-130 aircraft as hundreds milled around trying to get on flights out of the stricken region.
Officials said some aid was trickling through to those in need, despite fuel and transport shortages.
“The aid is getting out when you consider the amount of traffic coming in here. People at the extremities are probably getting it, but there are limitations,” an Australian army major, Grant King, said.
He said each Hercules C-130 plane, after unloading, was flying out with 50-60 refugees on board.
“If you go around to some places in Aceh, IDPs [internally displaced people] are getting aid,” said Michael Elmquist, head of the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs in Indonesia.
But many aid workers said they were growing frustrated at their inability to start to work.
Peter Sharwood, an orthopaedic surgeon from a private practice in Brisbane, said he had flown for 15 hours, but was unable to get transport into town to start helping.
“People need to be treated now, so that they don’t get deep infections … Those who had life-threatening injuries to start with have probably already died,” he said.
Sharwood said at least a dozen Australian doctors had flown in, including surgeons and infectious disease specialists.
As the death toll from the earthquake soared to nearly 120 000, nations donated about $480-million towards the world’s largest-ever relief effort. But the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, said even more would be needed.
With pledges mounting, armed forces round the world joined in the aid effort. A US aircraft carrier battle group was heading for Sumatra. South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Pakistan and scores of other nations also had planes in the air, rushing aid to victims.
The US, India, Australia, Japan and the UN have formed an international coalition to coordinate worldwide relief and reconstruction efforts.
“This is an unprecedented global catastrophe and it requires an unprecedented global response,” Annan said, as aid agencies warned that 5-million people lacked clean water, shelter, food, sanitation and medicine.
Death tolls across the region continued to grow. Indonesia led with some 80 000 confirmed dead. Sri Lanka reported about 28 500, India more than 7 300 and Thailand around 4 500, half of them foreigners. A total of more than 300 were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Somalia, Tanzania and Kenya.
As more bodies were recovered, families endured their sixth day of ignorance about the fate of friends and relatives. Tens of thousands were still missing, including at least 2 500 Swedes, more than 1 000 Germans and 500 each from France and Denmark.
In Sri Lanka, where more than 4 000 people are unaccounted for, television channels were devoting 10 minutes every hour to read the names and details of the missing. Often photos of the missing are shown with appeals that they should contact their families or police.
On the Thai resort island of Phuket, people scoured photos pinned to notice boards of the dead and missing in scenes reminiscent of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. ‒ Sapa, AFP, Guardian Unlimited Â