As dawn came up over Thailand’s west coast, Prayoon Damrongsiri was quarrelling with his son. The 47-year-old fisherman had just received a phone call from his daughter, who worked in the country’s meteorological department. She had told him that a seismic monitoring station had picked up series of irregular shifts in the seabed, of a type that could cause giant waves.
Prayoon did not want to go out to sea. But, as his son argued that there had been no tidal waves for decades, they set off into the Indian Ocean anyway — though he headed out to deep water, just to be on the safe side. It was a wise decision.
An hour earlier, thousands of kilometres away, Barry Hirshorn, a geologist at the Pacific Tsunami Centre in Honolulu, had heard his pager go off.
It told him of alerts from two far-apart seismic monitoring stations, meaning that whatever ”event” had just occurred was big. He rushed to his office.
A colleague was already sitting at a terminal in the operations room, staring at the thick blue seismic lines scrolling across the screen, trying to pinpoint the location of the earthquake.
At 3.14pm local time (8.14am GMT), and 15 minutes after the earthquake struck, Hirshorn and his colleagues issued a routine bulletin — which went to 26 Pacific nations — announcing an ”event” off the northern coast of Sumatra with a magnitude of 8,0.
Within the hour, a new bulletin revised it upwards — 8,5. This, the men at the Honolulu centre realised, was huge. Out in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Thailand, Prayoon and his son lowered their nets, entirely unaware of what was heading towards them.
Death or survival
The earthquake had been building up for almost 150 years. Sumatra stands on the Burma tectonic plate, one of more than a dozen giant rafts of rock that float over the Earth’s semi-molten mantle and whose interactions drive the planet’s seismic activity.
Just to the west of Sumatra, deep below its coast, the Indian-Australian plate is slowly moving east, grinding against — and pushing under — the Burma plate.
Every decade, the Indian-Australian pushes 6cm under the Burma plate. Or at least it tries to. For the past century and a half, there has been no movement at all along a 1 200km section of their boundary.
Then, at 00.58,53 GMT last Sunday morning, the friction that had been holding these two great geological protagonists apart gave way and 150 years of accumulated seismic strain was released. The Indian-Australian slipped 90cm under the Burma plate, which jumped almost a metre upwards into the waters of the Indian Ocean.
The effects were cataclysmic. Several thousand cubic kilometres of rock were abruptly displaced. A vast curtain of water was propelled upwards and a ring of energy — the equivalent of the release of 10 000 Hiroshima atom bombs — spread out at more than 480kph.
”This was a massive earthquake, one of the biggest recorded,” said Dr Glenn Ford, of the British Geological Survey, in Edinburgh. ”It measured 9,0 on the moment magnitude scale. There have been only three more powerful earthquakes in the past 100 years.”
Even worse, the earthquake was only 9,6km beneath the Burma plate. Earthquakes can occur at depths of up to several hundred kilometres. When they do, much of their energy is absorbed by surrounding magma and rock. There was no such geological cushion last Sunday. The energy pulsed through the water, powering towards coastlines all around the Indian Ocean.
The wave took two hours to reach Prayoon and his son, waiting with their nets.
”Suddenly the water went very clear. I had never seen it do that before,” he said. ”And then the swells began to come through under us.”
Prayoon was 3km off shore. The wave was moving at 8km a minute. It would reach the shore in 24 seconds.
Ricardo Cavallo, his wife Anna-Caterina and their eight-month-old daughter left their hotel room at the Meridien Resort on Thailand’s west coast at about 10.15am and walked the few hundred metres through the palm trees to the beach.
It was a stunning morning, with a clear blue sky and a flat, azure sea. Their resort was one of dozens hidden in the trees set back from the sea on the bay at Khao Sat, 96km north of Phuket. Just along the sand was the sprawling Sofitel complex, where hundreds of French and Scandinavian tourists were staying, as well as cheaper resorts with bungalows just metres from the sand.
As his family laid out their towels, Cavallo started filming his daughter, Mafalda, with a video camera. Through the lens, on the distant horizon, he saw a line of surf. Behind him, he heard shouts.
”A woman from the hotel was calling to us, saying that a big wave was coming,” the 33-year old Portuguese lawyer said. ”My wife grabbed my daughter and starting running. I picked up a few things and was just behind them.”
With the water at his heels, Cavallo ran up the beach, his wife and child just ahead of him. As he reached the hotel, he turned left on an impulse and ran up some steps, calling to his family to do likewise. But they carried straight on. Cavallo, now three storeys up, could only watch as the water surged in.
”It wasn’t one wave,” he said. ”It came in great surges, each one deeper than the last and pushing the water that had come in before in front of it.”
In fact, most witnesses talk of three main waves. The first knocked them off their feet, the second picked them up and carried them, often at up to 48kph, and the third, the most powerful, bore them high, up to 15m in some places, or sucked them under.
Then the water receded — almost as fast as it had come. Cavallo could do nothing but watch as his wife was knocked down and their daughter torn from her arms. Within half an hour, the resort — and dozens of others along the Khao Lat coast — had been virtually flattened.
Luxury hotels lay in ruins, roofs collapsed on dining rooms, swimming pools full of mud, bungalows packed with rubble and tree trunks and heavy, cement-like silt, as if by a giant fist. Fishing villages, less sturdily built than the concrete hotels, were smashed to bits.
Phi Phi island was inundated. An estimated 3 000 people were staying on the island. By the time the waters fell back, as many as a third were dead or badly injured.
In all, though no one yet knows for sure, about 11 000 people, including several thousand foreigners, are thought to have died along the Phuket coast. Cavallo was eventually reunited with his wife, who was badly injured, after a long search. Their daughter is still missing.
But the devastation in Thailand was nothing compared with the first place struck by the waves.
Marwan Saad was not that worried when he felt the earthquake, despite his home being less than 240km from the epicentre on a small island, just off the northern tip of Sumatra.
”The earthquake didn’t have that much effect,” he told The Observer after being evacuated to the city of Banda Aceh. ”It just felt like a normal earthquake.”
His calmness turned to fear less than 20 minutes later, when everyone in the village heard the tsunami coming towards them, even though he lived almost half a kilometre from the coast.
”It was like weird, loud thunder,” he said. ”We were unsure about what it was. So we went outside and could see [these huge waves] coming from afar. Then we all started running, trying to find higher ground.”
Marwan carried his three-month-old daughter, while he and his wife dragged their eight- and nine-year-old children with him
”The first wave destroyed my house: the second wave was even bigger,” he said. ”It must have been 25m high. I was submerged up to my neck; the kids were completely underwater. I was forced to save them as best I could.”
The fisherman, who has no possessions left except for the shorts, cagoule and flip-flops he was wearing when he ran, went back to his house a few hours later, once the water had subsided.
”Just the foundations of the house were left, nothing else.” But he considers himself lucky, because his whole family survived. ”People in some areas were not aware [of what was going on] and they were completely wiped out.”
Marwan’s story is typical of what the lucky few who escaped the tsunami endured. Fate played as great a role as anything in determining who fled.
One of the many eerie aspects of the disaster is that comparatively few people were injured — it was a case of death or survival.
”Normally, in natural disasters, you have 10 casualties for every death,” explained Patrick Sweeting, a United Nations expert on post-disaster reconstruction. ”Here, it was the other way round. You had 10 deaths for every casualty.”
As in every country affected by the disaster, it will be months before any accurate final death toll in Indonesia can be announced. There are simply too many dead people, of whom tens of thousands will never be found. Many were washed out to sea, while many others are buried in the mud and rubble that stretches for hundreds of miles along the coasts of Aceh province.
At least 10 towns, each with a population of about 10 000, have been completely flattened. The average survival rate is an appalling 7% in each one. Many others have suffered almost as badly.
And then there is Banda Aceh itself. In many parts of this once-thriving city of 400 000 souls, it looks as if an atom bomb has exploded. It was some of the more densely populated areas that took the brunt of the onslaught — and, being on the tip of the island, some neighbourhoods were trapped in a pincer of water as waves engulfed them from two different directions. Few people are arguing with estimates that more than 80 000 perished in this city alone.
Many people, like Asso Nangro, were swept for kilometres through Banda Aceh. He thought the waves were ”as big as the mountains” and covered everything. He was in the water for about 15 minutes and several times thought he was going to drown.
”At one stage, my left foot got stuck between some wood,” he said. ”I thought I was going to sink, but then it got hit by another piece of wood. There was a nasty crack as I heard it break, but at least it came free.”
He eventually managed to pull himself out of the water by climbing on to some planks drifting past and hobbled his way to a refugee camp. On Friday morning, he managed to get to the Fatimah hospital just as it reopened. But he has still not been operated on.
”I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but at least I’m now in hospital.”
Not only is it hard fully to comprehend just how many people died, but the scale of devastation is also equally hard to get a handle on, according to Sabine Reins, the head of the Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) mission in the province.
”When you see it from the air, you get one picture,” she said. ”Many things that should be there simply are no more. For example, the ferry harbour just doesn’t exist any more. It’s gone. Completely.
”And then, when you’re on the ground, where you can smell the dead bodies and see nothing but rubble until the horizon, you get a different image.”
MSF’s priority now is to locate the relatively small number of people who fled to the hills. Many emerged after a few days, not really confident that another tsunami would not come, but driven out of hunger and thirst.
Thousands of others, however, are thought to be still in the rugged forested interior, where they are not only slowly starving but are also running a real risk of picking up infections, doctors believe.
On top of that is the psychological trauma, which is starting to affect almost everyone — from the survivors to the troops who have to pull the bodies out of the rubble and bury them.
”Yesterday at the hospital we had a woman who just refused to let go of one of our doctors,” MSF’s Reins said.
”So, for two to three hours, while the doctor was doing consultations, she had this woman hugging her from behind.”
No one has any idea how long it will take to complete the emergency relief phase of the operation, let alone start rebuilding. The UN is launching an appeal next week for six months and Indonesia’s vice-president has predicted it will take five years to rebuild.
”But how do you even start thinking about rebuilding, when so many people are dead?” Sweeting said. ”You can’t rebuild towns if there’s no one to live in them.”
Aceh lay closest to the epicentre of the earthquake. But the wave sped across the ocean, smashing into Sri Lanka, south-eastern India and almost erasing the low-lying Andaman and Nicobar islands.
Dilip Kuruvilla, a merchant banker and keen angler, was standing in waist-deep water at the mouth of an estuary just south of the Indian port city of Chennai, his fishing rod fully extended, when the tsunami hit him.
”It was a clear, beautiful Sunday morning,” he said. ”Then, without a sound, a huge wave, maybe 20ft [6m] high, suddenly appeared from the sea and dragged me at stupendous speed to the rocky bottom of the estuary.’
Kuruvilla surfaced for air just as the tsunami broke. As he was being sucked out to sea by the receding wave, he grabbed a bramble bush growing on the bank of the estuary and managed to scramble on to firm ground.
But thousands of others who also found themselves in the path of the tsunami along peninsular India’s coastline were not as fortunate. At last count, the death toll in Tamil Nadu, the worst-hit, was more than 6 200, with an unaccounted number missing. Several hundred more died in the former French enclave of Pondicherry, in Andhra Pradesh and even in Kerala on the west coast.
The tsunami struck Tamil Nadu with such ferocity that it blacked out a nuclear plant, flooding the cooling system of the Madras atomic power station, which was built to withstand cyclones and tidal waves, forcing an emergency shutdown of the reactor.
In Mayurkuppam, the village near the plant, fisherman Murugan had just returned from the sea and was sorting the morning’s catch on the beach, along with his wife, Lachmi, and his sister-in-law, Srimati. His four-year-old daughter, Subbu, was playing nearby.
He, too, looked up to see a huge wall of water bearing down on the beach.
”I picked up my daughter and ran,” Murugan recalled, his voice choking. ”My wife and sister-in-law followed. They never made it.”
He found Lachmi’s body after two days; her younger sister is still missing.
In India, an overwhelming number of people who died in the tsunamis were women, children or the aged. A majority were also poor fishermen, living in hundreds of traditional hamlets perched on the edge of the sea. The rich and the middle classes mostly build their homes further inland, both out of choice and necessity — a law to protect coastal ecology prohibits major construction within 500m of the shoreline.
But though no foreign tourists were killed, there were many casualties among Indians from elsewhere in the vast country. On Boxing Day, pilgrims, both Christian and Hindu, flock to Nagapattinam district and to the small seaside town of Vailankanni, known as the ”Lourdes of the East”, in search of cures at a popular shrine to the Virgin Mary.
This time, though, there was no miracle at Vailankanni. More than 500 pilgrims died on the beach, with entire families wiped out. The devastation along the Nagapattinam coast was the most horrific, and about 50 fishing villages are said to have been completely flattened.
Nor did the people of Car Nicobar — a low-lying island in one of the world’s most inaccessible archipelagos — fare much better.
Many of the island’s 20 000-strong population, a mixture of Indian migrants and tribal Nicobarese, were asleep when the first waves came in. They emerged from their flimsy seaside houses to be confronted by a 21m slab of water.
Those who were quick ran into the jungle. Those who were slower were engulfed — and dragged into the Indian Ocean.
”We ran up into the forest and hid. My entire village was destroyed,” Casper James, from the village of Malacca, said. ”When we returned, there was nothing left. I saw only hands sticking out of the sand.”
The tsunami made no distinction between rich and poor. It swept away the local magistrate, 68 Indian air force personnel together with their families, and tribal fishermen. One woman took her children to the fourth floor of a building. Both were lost, wrenched from her arms. In a matter of minutes half of the island’s population — 10 000 people — had disappeared.
Elsewhere across the Indian-ruled Andaman and Nicobars — a 640km stretch of gleaming jade islands two hours’ flight from the mainland — it was the same grim story.
On the tiny island of Chaura, PC Michael Paul (22) was locking up his police station when the wave knocked him over.
”I had no chance to escape. A wall fell on top of me. The wave took me into the jungle, and then brought me back into the sea,” he said. His colleagues dragged Paul, who was badly injured, on to higher ground. They then spent two days waiting to be rescued, surviving on coconut juice and wild jungle potatoes.
Over at Indira Point, the state of India’s most southerly tip and only 160km from the earthquake’s epicentre, there was no trace of four scientists who had been studying giant leatherback turtles. They and their families simply vanished.
The official death toll in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been put at ”more than 3 000”. But the real figure appears to be much higher — with aid agencies suggesting that as many as 15 000 perished here.
By noon the destruction was complete — on Sri Lanka about 20 000 people had died. The wave had even reached East Africa, 6 000km away, claiming more than 170 lives in Somalia and one in Kenya — a man swimming off Malinda.
Aid inadequate
As the scale of the catastrophe started to become clear, Downing Street decided that no purpose would be served in interrupting the British prime minister’s holiday, as he could participate in conference calls with key ministers and officials.
It soon became clear that the United Kingdom’s early pledge of £1-million would be woefully inadequate. By Wednesday, the UK was forced to increase the figure to £15-million. By Thursday, as level of donations raised by the British public hit £25-million, the government felt obliged to trump this by offering £50-million in aid.
But the UK was not the only government playing catch-up. Last week’s unsteady aid effort revealed profound flaws in the response of governments and aid agencies to an ”unprecedented global catastrophe”, as Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, described the disaster on Thursday.
Aid agency sources say the response was understandably ”conventional” and based on their experience of previous flood and earthquake disasters. But by the middle of the week, serious questions were being asked about the ability of the vast bureaucracies of the Western aid organisations to react to the unique circumstances of the situation in south-east Asia.
British aid organisations took almost three days to coordinate their activities, in part owing to the absence of senior staff over the Christmas period. Only by lunchtime on Tuesday had the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella group for 12 disaster relief charities, including Oxfam, British Red Cross, Save the Children and ActionAid, finally met.
The DEC, which had been concentrating its efforts on getting help to refugees from the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, was forced to suddenly shift its focus to a situation that no one could gave foreseen.
Britain’s biggest international relief charity, Oxfam, defended the approach of the charities, saying that news of the work done by workers on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the disaster was taking time to seep through to the Western media, for the same reasons that the full scale of the disaster had taken time to register because of the complete collapse of the local communications and media infrastructure.
”This is not primarily a matter of white aid workers getting on planes and flying to the region,” said Oxfam’s Helen Palmer. ”In many parts of the disaster area, this has been about local workers getting out and delivering help, often when their own homes have been destroyed and family members have been caught up in the floods.”
By the end of the week, it was clear that, despite the odds, some had managed to work effectively. In the Sri Lankan port city of Trincomalee, ARM Saifullah, an Oxfam programme coordinator, organised a 100-member volunteer team of local youths to help survivors, despite the fact that his own house was under water and several members of his family were missing.
For two days, Saifullah was incommunicado because of damage to the Trincomalee Oxfam office, but it later turned out that he had commandeered a ferry and was delivering food packages and medical aid to isolated Muslim communities to the south of his home town.
Much of the British aid effort has been concentrated on Sri Lanka and India, where there are already sophisticated networks of the major UK charities.
On Thursday, David Fall, the British ambassador to Thailand, said the country did not need aid and was coping better than other countries hit by the giant wave. The Thai minister of the interior confirmed that aid was not the issue for his nation, but that there was an urgent need for antibiotics to combat disease.
Last week, the Thai government added a request for refrigerator lorries and dry ice to help preserve the thousands of corpses left rotting in open air morgues.
All week, Prescott, in charge of coordinating the British government’s relief effort, remained in daily contact with Blair. Despite criticism, the prime minister refused to cut short his holiday, but rewrote his New Year message to include a reference to the disaster. But Blair had to step in to head off an unseemly row over who would run the international aid effort.
By Thursday evening, aid agencies were demanding clarification on the government’s reaction to the announcement by United States President George Bush on Wednesday that he had established a core group with Japan, India and Australia to deal with the disaster.
Bush’s move was seen in some quarters as a calculated snub to the UN. Blair also batted away calls from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to call an emergency summit of the world’s richest countries, as Britain took over the presidency of the G8 group of nations this week. The prime minister made it clear that Britain believed the UN should take the lead in the relief operation.
But if Blair was under fire, it was nothing compared to the criticism levelled at Bush. He was attacked for his slow reaction to the international crisis, only rousing himself from his Christmas break at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, four days after the tsunami struck. The New York Times led the criticism, describing Bush’s initial aid package of $15-million as ”stingy”.
The White House reacted sharply, upping the US aid donation to first $35-million and then to $350-million by the end of the week. An aircraft carrier battle group was dispatched to Indonesia to offer assistance and, in a show of international solidarity, Bush agreed to join an international conference on tsunami aid proposed by European Union development aid commissioner Louis Michel, and conceded that the UN would have to be involved with the ”core group” of nations.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell immediately announced that he would be meeting Annan on Friday to hammer out details of how the relationship would operate. In all more than $1,2-billion has been pledged.
Yet local governments in the affected areas hardly covered themselves with glory either. It took Thai rescuers four days to start work in Khao Lat — and longer to reach devastated fishing villages further along the coast.
The Indonesian government announced that it would be hosting an international donor conference on January 6 — but was clearly uncertain about how to deal with a humanitarian crisis in a part of its country where it has been fighting a nasty guerrilla war against separatist rebels for decades.
Sri Lanka faced the same problem and also came out badly. Many onlookers alleged that aid was being funnelled away from areas run by the Tamil Tigers in the north of the country.
In the Andaman and Nicobar islands, old-fashioned Indian administrators in Port Blair, the capital, moved swiftly — to rescue the survivors, but also to avoid what they regarded as ”foreign meddling”.
International aid agencies who poured into the capital found themselves shut out from the relief effort. Two frustrated representatives from MSF even gatecrashed a press conference held by the islands’ patrician Lieutenant Governor, Ram Kapse, begging to be allowed to help.
Back in Delhi, 2 240km away, India’s Congress Party Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, also turned down US offers of assistance. Within days, aid was arriving in Port Blair, but not much of it was reaching the survivors further south who, dazed and exhausted, were cowering on their remote islands without food and water.
Critics said that police and relief workers in Tamil Nadu were distracted by the stream of politicians coming to the region to ”show support” — and have their pictures taken.
By this weekend, the situation was mixed. Though aid was beginning to come through in some areas, in others the relief efforts were chaotic. There is still no sign of a coordinated operation for the estimated two million people who have been displaced in Aceh, where planes have been dropping supplies, unable to land at the nearest airport, and in India, much of the work is being done by individual local volunteer groups.
Whatever the reality, the truth is that, after a slow start, one of the world’s biggest-ever humanitarian relief operations was under way. But there was still desperate need. The death toll was heading towards 150 000 and there were more than half a million people homeless.
As ever, the new threat was from disease. Some experts said that cholera, dysentery and other communicable diseases could kill as many, if not more, as the initial tidal waves, with children once again the most vulnerable.
What is certain is that for tens of millions of people around the Indian Ocean — not only those who have lost family, friends, homes or livelihoods, but all those who live by the sea — life will never be the same again.
In Phuket International hospital, Carl-Ove Faester, a Norwegian priest working at an emergency registration desk set up by the Norwegian government for people caught up in the disaster, explained that many of the casualties had not been able to sleep since the tidal wave swept in.
”They lie awake at night listening for the sound of the sea,” Faester said. He was describing, too, the many nights ahead for almost half the planet. — Guardian Unlimited Â