I SAW MYSELF IN EVERY SCENE
I SAW MYSELF IN EVERY SCENE
A survivor reacts to “The Impossible”
By John Thompson
(Editor's Note: John Thompson was in Khoa Lak during the 2004
Tsunami. Recently, he attended a showing of “The Impossible.” This is a note
from John Thompson, describing his experience from seeing the film, and his
subsequent reflections). You can read John's
original story here.
It's not very often a movie is made about an event that
received worldwide attention in which you can picture yourself in every scene.
The opening moments in The Impossible, of a family enjoying Christmas day
at the Khao Lak Orchid hotel were especially meaningful to me, since I also
spent that
same day at the same hotel. Christmas evening I also spent at
a beach front restaurant watching lanterns being released into the sky.
The morning of December 26 I ate breakfast on an outdoor patio at my
bungalow hotel, watching a British family with two young boys playing in the
surf (the boys survived, but their
parents would end up dying later that morning)." Despite
the extraordinary special effects that went into recreating the
tsunami, I didn't find that part especially frightening. I supposed when
you have lived through the real thing, it just isn't possible to re-live it in
a movie. Maybe it is because my experience was slightly different.
I saw the wave coming, didn't recognize what it was, watching on the
beach until it was almost too late. Then I started running away from the
wave, with a group of people, on a street leading up from the beach.
About a block up the street I saw there was no way I could outrun the
wave, and darted into a strong looking hotel building. That split-second
decision likely saved my life, and I wish I had called out to the other people
running on the street to do the same, but almost no one did; they all kept
running up the street.
The Impossible did bring back many memories of those
moments. The fleeing of the birds, the rush of air, the total inundation
with water after the initial crashing wave passed through.
(Original Photo from John Thompson taken on December 26, 2004 in Khao Lak)
Parts that
weren't quite the same were the screams from people in the water that I can
still distinctly hear, the raging muddy water, and the irony of such a
devastating event happening on a beautiful morning with a bright blue
sky. After the initial wave rushed through, I and the few people
remaining in the hotel, climbed to the highest point in the hotel, similar to
how the mother and son in the movie climbed into a tree fearing another wave.
There we waited for several hours, watching and listening to the water
slowly drain back into the sea. Other than the sound of the draining
water, it was quiet. There were few people left. Finally when the
water receded enough so that our refuge was no longer an artificial
island, but once again connected to land, the small group of us on the roof
climbed down and began picking our way through the mud, down power lines,
overturn vehicles, and other debris, making our way to higher ground and
safety. Like in the movie, we salvaged water and drinks from the hotel,
and made tourniquets out of hotel towels for a few
badly injured people.
That night, I and many other survivors camped out in the
jungle on a hill top, hopefully above the reach of any further waves, although
I do remember talking with people about the possibility of another wave could
even reach our height. By morning, helicopters were buzzing our camp,
although no relief help seemed to be in site on the ground, so I and another
survivor started hiking up the highway towards the next village. We soon
were given a ride to a bus station where we caught an overnight bus to Bangkok.
A few days later, after getting a new passport, buying new clothes and
other essentials, I flew back to Krabi on an American Air Force C-130, where I
and a friend volunteered at a hospital. Later we rented a jeep and drove
back to Khao Lak, where the devastation was still very fresh.
Similar to the movie, we saw bodies piled in trucks, lined up on the side
of the road, and stacks of coffins. The smell of decaying, rotting,
bloated, water-logged flesh was overpowering, and not possible to convey in a
movie. We looked at postings on bulletin boards of photos of
bodies and lists of missing people.
The movie really captured the horrific time that survivors
went through trying to locate family members with whom they had just hours
before been enjoying an idyllic Christmas holiday. The
randomness of why people survived versus those that didn't is hard to
comprehend. Out of couples and families, it was unusual that all members
of the family made it through alive. As for me, I am forever thankful
that I ended up on the side of randomness of those that lived. Survivors
of the tsunami share a special connection, knowing what it is like to come so
close to losing everything. For those that were lucky enough not to have
had to live through it, The Impossible does a very credible job of providing a
glimpse into the chaos and suffering caused by the 2004 tsunami.
Labels: John Thompson, Khao Lak, The Impossible, tsunami survivor
Survivors applaud "The Impossible."
It is Sunday evening in
California. This weekend, the movie “The Impossible” (Director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G.Sanchez) and starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and TomHolland premier in wide screen at over 500 screens across the USA. As I
mentioned in last weeks blog post, I saw the movie about a week ago, knowing I
wanted – needed – to see this movie before friends and family saw it this
weekend.
As I
anticipated, the weekend has been filled with mixed emotion. A number of family
members, friends, and even strangers attended the movie. And following the
movie, felt compelled to call me or send me emails. Most of their reaction was,
“Rick, I had no idea that is what you went through.”
This
reaction, along with the reaction of movie critics and film goers confirms what
I also believe. The movie is that good. Or better said, “that real.”
This
afternoon, I spent about 45 minutes talking on the phone with another tsunami
survivor. He was also on Khoa Lak, the same beach that Henry (Erique) and Maria
and their three boys were on as dipicted in the film. This is about 15 miles
north of Patong where I and others experienced the same tsunami in Phuket. We
had not talked in three years. But we both knew, as the anticipation of the
release of this film, that we would eventually find a way to call and talk with
each other when this film came out.
One of
the things that both Peter and I agreed on was the small details of the film.
In fact, there were items that we both agreed were so real that we had even
forgotten them from our actual experiences.
For us
both, the film was emotional to watch. Not because we were necessarily thrown
back into the reality of those 72 hours beginning at 9:30 am on December 26,
2004. But because for the first time, we both said, “Now people can actually
understand and feel what it felt like to be in the middle of the tsunami.”
Over the
last 8 years, I have been asked many times to explain “how did it feel to be in
the middle of the tsunami?” Well meaning reporters and friend urge us to
describe the details.
But this
movie “shows” the details.
One of
the best example of how this movie gets it right is in the “swirling debis ofwater.” For so long, I have tried to explain to people how dangerous the water
was. Huge shards of glass from broken out hotel plate glass windows, pieces of
tuk-tuks and huge chunks of pieces of building filled the water. Once a person
asked, “Couldn’t you just swim” in the water. But as this movie so well
describes, it was like being in a washing machine of deadly debris.
The director
and writer also accurately depicted the sense of desperation as mothers,
fathers, brothers and sisters walked around looking for missing loved ones.
Because most people had their personal belongings swept away, they didn’t even
have pictures. And so they were walking around desperately trying to describe
their children or mothers or fathers. And because there were visitors from
around the world, and many were in shock, people would walk right up to you and
start to speak in Swedish or German or Spanish – not even realizing or
understanding that you didn’t understand.
There was
another interesting moment and a poignant moment for me, when Henry Belon (Ewen
McGregor) is shown in the movie calling his wife’s parents. McGregor struggles
to explain that he has lost his wife and two of the children. On the other end
of the line, you hear a father trying to comprehend what he is being told. That
moment in the scene struck me also as very real.
I
remember calling my parents back in Kansas, and trying to explain to them to “not
be worried, but eventually they would see something on the television about a
wave in Thailand, but that I had survived.” I remember her reaction was calm,
almost unbelieving. Like many people in the world, true word and news of the devastation
did not reach mainstream media until 4-6 hours after the first wave had hit.
And even then, news stations like CNN reported that “…25 people had been killed…”
No one knew the level of destruction until days later. The phone call was meant
to tell someone that I was ok. But later, as I reflected on it, it was also a
way to report to the outside world that I had lived. That I was ok.
As I
talked about in my in my initial journal entries, I had a cell phone that
lasted for hours that morning. Over 200 people used the phone to call home to
places all around the world, mostly to say, “I am ok. I am alive.” For days
afterwards, I continued to get return phone calls, asking to talk to people who
had originally used the phone. I had no idea of how to find them or what to
even say. But I would take down a phone number and description just in case.
About 24 hours after the original calls, I started to get phone calls from
individuals who had heard about my phone number from others who had heard from
their loved ones. The cell phones that worked that day were important moments
of comfort for many people that fateful day.
With
other survivors this weekend, we talked about memories of things we had
forgotten. We talked about the splitting of families, and the struggle on
whether to move on to a hospital, or stay were you were to look for missing people.
The movie accurately showed an element that has been a little embarrassing to
discuss up until now. The speed and turbulence of the water as so strong, that
it did remove clothes. IN the movie, Maria Belon is shown with ripped clothes.
But it has been reported that she, like many others, had their clothes
completed stripped away. Standing on the cliff, many survivors came to us
completely naked, and bleeding badly.
We also
talked about the “post 24 hour false tsunami warnings.” The next day, after the
tsunami had struck, there would be moments in which you would be working to
help clear debris, and suddenly, locals around you would start to run. At least
5-10 times, false warnings would be spread via cell phones to other cell
phones. And people would just start running.
There
were other details that the film didn’t show. The amount of dead bodies strewn
about were tough. You see in the movie the rows of them at hospitals or make
shift morgues. Most of that happened after about 24 hours. But before that,
there were bodies jammed into debris everywhere.
Another
item that even some of us as survivor disagreed on, were the number of waves.
From my perspective, the waves, at least in Phuket started at about 10:00 am –
and continued with swells that washed into the streets until 4:00 that
afternoon. The first wave was small, but it was the second wave that was the
tallest and most devastating. The wave you see in the movie made it look like
it was the first wave of destruction. But most of us agree, that the size of
that wave was actually the second. But I did read the real Maria Belon did
agree that the six hours of relentless waves had been consolidated in order to
get on with the movie. Fair enough. But as survivors, we just wanted everyone
to know that water and waves were an issue for the first six hours. And not
only did people lose their lives in those first waves, but they also tried to
make a run for it afterwards, and were also struck and swept away in waves
three, four and five.
ABOUT THE
CONTROVERSY
For the
last 10 days, I have been reading some reviewers who need to point out what
they didn’t like about the film. Most need to point out that the movie skips
over or ignores the emotions of the locals. I don’t think that this is an “and/or”
discussion. This movie was about 5 people and what happened to them. There
could and should be another movie about the amazing local people that were also
impacted by the tsunami. They also felt pain. They also lost loved ones. They
were crying and hurt and scared just like people around us.
After the
tsunami struck, many of the locals left the resort I was staying in. If they
had survived, many had homes inland and left to go be with family. But not
without grief. Most locals had an aunt or uncle or cousin who they knew were
killed that day on the beach. But the process of finding and navigating and
dealing with the process of finding / mourning and deciding what to do next was
very different.
Each of
the survivors I have connected with over the last days applaud this movie. We
have a sense that others are really understanding what we went through. We also
hope future movies can be made of what the locals also went through – not only
in Thailand, but also in the other countries where 220,000 more people were
killed.
It is
likely that many of will have nightmares again for a few days. But the
difference is this time, when we wake up, we can talk to people who have seen
the film, and have a little better idea what we experienced.
Thanks to
the actors Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast for bringing the characters to life.
Thanks to Director Juan Antonio Bayona and
screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez for trying to make it real. Thanks to Maria
Belon for sharing her survivor story with the world.
Because of this, a few of us are a little more healed.
(I invite other survivors to comment on their reaction to the movie. Or others to ask us questions. - Rick Von Feldt)
Labels: Ewan MacGregor, Henry Belon, Juan Antonio Bayona, Khao Lak, Lucas Belon, Naomi Watts, Orchid Beach Resort, survivor Maria Belon, The Impossible, Thomas Holland, tsunami, tsunami survivor, von feldt
Survivor: Mark, Mardie and William Oberle
Mark Oberle, his wife Mardie Oberle and son William Oberle arrived late the night before the tsunami struck on December 26. They awoke to the early morning earthquake. Their hotel was a block off the beach. Mark Oberle shared his notes on what happened to he and his family at Patong Bay in Phuket Thailand on December 26, 2004. This information is originally
from this website.
Mark and his family had planned on spending part of his Christmas holiday snorkeling with his family
in Phuket. Instead, he assisted in the rescue and treatment of victims of a
tsunami that struck the region on Dec. 26. Oberle and his family had
visited friends in Bangkok, Thailand, before flying to the island of Phuket late
Dec. 25. The next morning, the tsunami hit. Patong Beach, where he and his
family were staying, was one of the hardest hit areas on the island. Oberle used
his skills as a physician and public health emergency specialist to help set up
triage and rescue injured people in the tsunami's aftermath.
Mark Oberle is Co-Director of the
Summer
Institute for Public Health Practice and Principal Investigator for the
Northwest Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center, housed at
NWCPHP. Mark was the first
Director of NWCPHP when it opened in 1990. He currently serves as an Associate
Dean for the School of Public Health
and Professor in the Departments of Health
Services, Epidemiology, Global Health and Adjunct
Professor in Biomedical Informatics
and Medical Education.
Tsunami, December 26, 2004 at Patong
Beach, Phuket, Thailand: Personal Notes from Mark Oberle
TSUNAMI, December 26, 2004
Our vacation in Thailand took an
ominous turn the day after Christmas. During the monumental Indian Ocean
tsunamis on December 26, my wife, my son and I had just arrived at the south
end of Patong Beach, on the island of Phuket, one of the severely impacted
beach areas in Thailand. Our hotel was one building back from the beachfront
hotels, so although there was brief flooding on the ground floor level and
later problems with water and electricity, we were fine. My notes focus on the
first three hours of first aid and rescue before the ambulances arrived---at
one portion of one beach on one island. This kind of effort went on at
thousands of locations around the Indian Ocean that morning against a backdrop
of unknown risk of further tsunami waves. For these countries December 26, 2004
was like September 11, 2001 in the USA.
As background: We were so far behind
at work and at home, that even in early December we were not sure we could take
the time for the trip. So on December 13 when we finally confirmed the hotel
reservation, the waterfront hotels were booked for the Christmas holidays. The
hotel we did get was spacious and had 36 acres of grounds with tropical plants
(Duangjitt Resort on Patong Beach, http://www.duangjittresort-spa.com/). As our taxi
drove from the Phuket Airport late on December 25, we passed through downtown
Patong Beach and saw plenty of activity in the clubs and restaurants even at
that hour. We checked into our hotel shortly after midnight, and noticed that
there was still a party listening to the band in the open air bar. Those were
the hotel guests who probably would sleep in and not go to the beach too early
on December 26. At that point we did not have a clear understanding of where
the beach was located in relation to the row of waterfront hotels. Those hotels
were separated from the Duangjitt Hotel by a large lawn and garden, maybe 100
yards wide.
We slept in late, but about 8AM we
were awoken by the bed shaking for 2-3 minutes (and it was not from the couple
next door). It was clear this was an earthquake, followed 20 minutes later by
another. Because this is not a region of major quakes, I just assumed that they
were small, local quakes. The possibility of a tsunami never crossed my mind.
We lingered at breakfast in the open
air restaurant adjacent to the hotel lobby. As we later realized, almost all of
the guests were from Europe, with very few visitors from Canada and the USA.
Many did not speak English well and the Thai hotel staff knew just enough
English to do their jobs rather than converse. Communications was to become a
major problem. William, Mardie and I were just heading upstairs to change for
the beach when we suddenly noticed people running into the lobby from the hotel
entry driveway, shouting in Thai. We did not know what the commotion was about.
I heard an explosion and saw a
roiling black mass of water next to a waterfront hotel. I thought it was a
sewer line breaking. Mardie thought it was a dam failure, and many others
thought it was a terrorist attack. Quickly after there were more distant
explosions to the north up the beach, sounding like canon fire. The
"explosions" were from the initial large wave slapping into the
concrete buildings as the wave successively reached different points up the
beach. Then I saw a swell of floodwater heading our way--- perhaps just a 3-4
foot deep plateau of water with a roiling mass of water and debris at the
leading edge. Then I finally realized it was a tsunami, related to the
earthquakes two hours earlier. However, even at that point I thought it was a small
tsunami and did not understand the magnitude of the disaster because our view
of the coast was blocked by the intervening palms and line of beachfront
hotels.
We went up to our second floor room
and saw the floodwaters quickly fill up the courtyard around the pool, carrying
chairs, palm fronds and other debris with it. A few minutes later a second,
higher wave of floodwater entered the courtyard and filled the pool with mud
and debris. The water eventually reached the lower edge of the sliding glass door
to the room below us. It flooded out some bungalows, but only entered a few of
the ground floor rooms in the main building. A sinkhole started to form
underneath the patio below our room, and floodwater rushed under the building.
(Photo by Mark Oberle)
Mardie had gone downstairs to check
on the flood and quickly called me to say that there were injured people in the
lobby. I went downstairs and found panicked tourists milling about. Several
injured people were lying or sitting in the open air bar. A young Thai woman
had a broken right arm and multiple abrasions and lacerations contaminated with
sand. One of the hotel staff tried to translate and told us the woman was
concerned that her money had disappeared from her bathing suit pocket. She did
not know if she had been robbed or the wave action had cleaned out her pocket.
I started to treat her wounds, but quickly realized that there were too many
other wounded who also needed attention. Mardie and I recruited other hotel
guests to help. We rigged up a splint from a broken piece of furniture, and I
showed hotel guests how to cut up sheets and use bottled water to clean wounds.
Lying on the floor was a young Thai man in a bathing suit who had inhaled a
slurry of water and sand. Although he was frothing, his pulse and level of consciousness
were good, and he could speak to me.
An American I had not seen before
stood on a chair and shouted over people in the lobby to tell them to keep
calm, keep children nearby, not to run, and to check in for possible word of an
evacuation. I thought he was the hotel manager, but we later learned that
Michael Hoffman had just arrived from his home in Copenhagen and was checking
in to the hotel when the tsunami hit. At this point, North Americans and
Europeans watching television already had news of the huge earthquake and risk
of tsunamis, but I did not understand the extent of damage even on our own
beach. I mistakenly thought that the tsunami wave that hit our beach was not
much higher than the torrent of water that reached our hotel.
A German man and his son rushed up
to us and asked if I could come upstairs to tend to his wife. Mardie continued
to clean the Thai woman's wounds while I followed them up to the third floor,
carefully stepping through the slippery mud around the poolside, where the
floodwater had subsided. The German woman was lying on a mattress on the
exterior walkway floor. She had a fracture or severe bruise of her left
shoulder, but could still move her arm. She had several severe lacerations and
had thick tar adhering to her skin. I showed her family how to cut up some
sheets and dress the wounds. I lent them my penknife to cut the hair around a
deep scalp laceration. I then went downstairs briefly to make sure there were
no more severe injuries and checked in with Mardie who was still tending the
Thai woman's lacerations. I tried to ask the Thai hotel staff if there were any
more severely wounded people. Although I got a negative reply, I was not sure
that they had understood me or even canvassed the hotel. I went back upstairs,
checked on the German woman, and got my penknife back.
As soon as I returned downstairs to
the lobby, a Norwegian named Rolf, came up to me and said that there was a
woman in shock in the adjacent waterfront hotel. Since the situation seemed in
control in the Duangjitt Hotel lobby, I followed him through 1-2 foot
floodwaters in a circuitous route across the open lawn to the backside of the
Patian hotel [spelling?]. I was wearing flip flop sandals, so the footing was
tricky as we slogged through mud and water, around rebar, lawn chairs, and
other debris and jumped a drainage canal. Several times the mud sucked my
sandals off, but I focused on moving as fast as I could without tripping and
injuring myself on the hidden debris under the muddy water. As we walked to the
beach hotels, a tall European man and a Thai woman were having an argument as
they rushed away from the beach. I could only hear the Thai woman say,
"You are not the only one who...."
Rolf and I reached the back of the
beachfront hotels and went up the northernmost stairway which was slippery with
mud, blood and debris. On the top (4th) floor there were two young English
sisters who were wounded and a Thai woman and a Norwegian man (the latter had
rented the room and the two English sisters had run without their shoes from
the beach up the stairs as high as they could go to take refuge). One sister
had relatively minor lacerations and was standing. The other was lying on the
bed and was pale and shivering. Her pulse was surprisingly normal. She had
multiple lacerations, the worst of which was a penetrating wound of her right
gluteal muscle, deeply contaminated with sand and mud. Although the bleeding
had stopped, I had no idea how soon she would get treated in the hospital since
I had no idea how many injured there were elsewhere or when we could get her
out. I had only heard one distant ambulance come to my hotel, and had no idea
how close an ambulance could get to the waterfront buildings. So I showed the
man and the Thai woman how to cut up some fresh sheets and clean up the milder
lacerations while I tried to clean somewhat the gluteal laceration.
As I was cleaning the lacerations, I
looked out the window and for the first time realized that the surf was still
high. In fact it occasionally surged into the lower floor of the hotel below
me, rattling cars and other debris in the hotel courtyard. With so much debris,
the waves made a powerful, rattling sound as they crashed, like the surf in the
Bering Sea when ice is breaking up. At that point I assumed that the hotel was
right on the beach and that the waves were only somewhat abnormally high. (In
fact the hotel was separated from the beach by a patio, boulevard and seawall.
The waves I was hearing were still tsunami waves that may have peaked 7-10 feet
above the high tide mark). I realized that anyone who had not made it behind
the hotels or climbed above the first floor of the beachfront hotels would most
likely have been drowned, crushed or sliced to death.
The only sound I heard was these incoming
waves and a persistent horn from a small delivery truck that had been pushed
onto a palm tree behind the hotel. The usually vocal local birds (Common Myna
and Yellow-vented Bulbul) were silent. Farther out to sea the ocean was coated
with debris and oil. Several boats and a passenger barge drifted around without
a crew. A few boats were under power, presumably searching for survivors or
bodies.
The two English sisters' father was
also injured but sitting on the balcony two floors below in the adjacent hotel
(the SeaGull). I called down to him several times, but like his daughters he
said he was injured but doing OK. I reassured the sisters and wrote down the
name of my hotel on a calling card in case I could not get back.
I then tried to get to their father
from the second floor hotel room. The narrow gap between the two hotels was
hopelessly filled with a tangle of debris. So the only way there was to climb
onto the railing of the second floor balcony and then clamber down into the
back of a Toyota pickup truck that was tilted at a 45 degree angle in the gap
between the two hotels (see photo). I then climbed onto the pickup cab, which
was slippery with mud and blood. I pulled myself onto the balcony of the
SeaGull Hotel and met the English girls' father. He had multiple lacerations
but one very deep one on the back side of his left thigh that extended across
the back of his leg, with severely damaged muscle tissue and some persistent
bleeding. Someone had used a sheet as a bandage but it was saturated with blood
and hanging off to the side of the wound.
Another tourist (Italian?) was
standing nearby but I had trouble communicating with him. I tried to tell him
we needed to find clean sheets to stop the bleeding. He got the idea and was
about to kick in the nearby hotel room door, when I signaled to stop. The glass
windows had been smashed by the waves, so I just reached around through the
window and opened the door from inside. I put a clean pressure bandage on the
Englishman and later helped him get out of the porch chair in the sun and lie
down on the bed. He had plenty of water and a soda. He joked that he never
liked Coke but really appreciated it now. I told him I would find a way to get
him and his daughters out.
I asked the Italian if there were
more wounded, and he led me around a second floor walkway to the hotel office.
On the floor was sitting a Thai man who had a single deep laceration on his
ankle that he signaled had cut his Achilles' tendon. The dressing looked in
good shape, so I did not change it. The hotel manager or desk clerk was there,
but could barely speak English. He seemed dazed, but I was able to ask him if
there were other injured people. He led me up a back stairway to the third
floor where a heavyset German man was lying on a roll away bed. His wife was
quietly sitting in a chair next to him. The German man spoke English and told
me that he had been pinned by a car and had back and abdominal pain. He said he
had just had abdominal surgery two weeks before. His pulse and color were good,
but he may have had decreased sensation in his toes. He asked for an injection
for his pain. I had to tell him that I was a tourist too, but we would find a
way to get him out.
A sudden moment of calm happened as
I was about to rush downstairs. A woman in the adjacent hotel room (she sounded
East African?) had been listening to my conversation with the German man. She
appeared calm and focused (or maybe I just imagined that). She pointed out that
the quiet German woman had a deep scalp laceration. So I asked the hotel
manager if he could get a pair of scissors, and I showed the African woman how
to cut the hair away from the wound and clean and bandage the laceration.
I then asked the hotel manager how
we could evacuate the injured. He led me down a back stairway to a loading
dock. The loading dock backed up to what may have been a kitchen and dining
room, but it was now completely blown open on the east and west sides, with
tangled metal, vent pipes, and dangling wires bracketing a view of the ocean.
At that moment we heard an ambulance siren and I felt a huge sense of relief.
But as it approached a building just north of us, it turned back. The front of
the hotel was still not accessible due to water and debris. A dazed,
middle-aged tourist walked into what had been the kitchen. He stated in a far
away voice that the local authorities had predicted another, larger tsunami
(10m) and that people were told to evacuate. He then slowly ambled toward the
ocean. I called after him, but he just kept walking. A young man wearing a bike
helmet ran in from the back and yelled out the same warning. The idea of a
larger tsunami did not make sense to me. Although I had no idea where the
earthquake's epicenter was, the fact that there were two major tsunami waves
following two earthquakes, made me think that we had in fact experienced the
major tsunamis from those quakes. If that were true, we would have to feel
another quake of the same magnitude if there were going to be still more large
waves. [That reasoning is not true, as rescue crews have discovered after
Japanese tsunamis].
Nevertheless I was concerned that
the injured may need to be moved soon if the warnings of new tsunamis were
true. I wanted the hotel manager to send one of the uninjured men from his office
over to my hotel, to get men to carry the wounded over there where I knew
trucks were now able to drive to. But I either could not communicate this, or
the man disagreed with my suggestion. So I wrote out two duplicate notes
tersely listing the names, locations and condition of the injured people, with
a priority list of who should be evacuated first in case an ambulance arrived
before I could get back with stretcher crews. [Since we had only been in
Thailand 10 days, I had no idea how emergency services are organized. It is
quite possible that the hotel manager had sent out a messenger on foot with
word of the injured, and he was just waiting for the ambulances to show up].
It was 12:30. I exited through what
was left of the back of the hotel, and made my way to the main road that led
inland. By this point most of the flood water had subsided. Back at my hotel,
Mardie told me that the Thai woman with the broken arm had vanished. She had
attended some other tourists with lacerations. One girl was panicked as she
watched Mardie try to patch up a deep laceration that exposed bone on her
father's leg.
I approached Michael Hoffman and
asked if he was the hotel manager. He said he was not, but asked what I needed.
I told him I needed 16 volunteers and plastic pool beds to carry the injured
from the SeaGull and Paitin hotels back to the Duangjitt Hotel where vehicles
could transport them to the hospital. There were instantly plenty of
volunteers. I told them that the first order of business was their own safety
and that we would slog through the debris field only as fast as we could safely
travel. Since I thought Rolf had been staying at one of the beachfront hotels,
I asked him to lead us back to the English sisters' room. (It turns out Rolf
knew no more than I did. He had been staying at the Duangjitt Hotel and did not
realize that the beach access road was now a drier route to the beachfront. But
at least he remembered the stairway to the room after our band of volunteers
sloshed through the mud across what had been a lawn). When we got to the Paitin
hotel, we initially climbed up the wrong stairway, then the correct one. There
was a moment of confusion when I tried to split up the party of rescuers. I
think a number of them did not understand my English, so a traffic jam occurred
on the stairs. The stairway was too narrow for the stretchers, but the two
English sisters were able to limp down with assistance. I asked Rolf and
another European who had done some medic work to coordinate taking the two
sisters back to the Duangjitt on the beach chairs.
The rest of the rescue party then
followed me across the second floor balcony and over the pickup truck and
debris to the south balcony of the Sea Gull hotel where the Englishman seemed
in good spirits. By this time the beach road in front of the hotel looked
drier, but the stairway down was blocked by debris. I was not sure if exiting
out the front was safe if in fact a major tsunami was going to hit as
predicted. So five of us continued down to the office to scout out the back
exit route. But the back route had some broken wall fragments surrounded by
water, that made it difficult for a stretcher party to navigate. Then I noticed
that 2 small ambulances had arrived immediately in front of the building. I
gingerly negotiated the wreckage through the front patio and found that the
German man was in one ambulance. A British woman doctor was tending to him in
the ambulance. I led the other ambulance driver to the Englishman. Unbeknownst
to me, some Thai volunteers started clearing away debris to the front stairway.
So while I was trying to communicate a complicated exit route out the back,
there was suddenly a perfectly clear, shorter route out front. One of the
volunteers from our hotel vigorously tapped me on the shoulder and communicated
this fact to me in Italian and English. Although that was the easiest exit
route, I am still not sure that it was the safest since there could still be
another major tsunami wave. The Thai medic brought up a stretcher board, and
the Thai volunteers prepared to lift him. I quickly pushed a few of them to the
side of the room since half of them were barefoot and were not aware of the
broken glass on the floor. I pushed the glass out of the way, and the party
then lifted the Englishman out to the ambulance.
That seemed to complete the
evacuation at that location. I took the unused pool chair back to the Duangjitt
Hotel to check on the English sisters. But they had already been taken to the
hospital by the time I arrived. I had expected to rest, but Mardie had been
tending several other people with severe lacerations at the Duangjitt Hotel.
They were about to be put on a truck to the hospital.
Somehow word had been communicated
to our hotel that another, 10 meter tsunami was coming and that we should all
evacuate to higher ground. A truck had already taken small children and their
mothers. Mardie, William and I rushed to our hotel room and gathered food,
water, sunscreen, mosquito repellant, a Thai phrase book, extra clothing, and
other essentials in daypacks and walked briskly up the road toward the closest
hill. It was never clear how authoritative this evacuation order was. In fact,
foot and auto traffic was moving both toward and away from the beach. We walked
up the main road and then climbed up to some hillside apartments where several
dozen tourists and Thais had already gathered. A very generous Thai woman who
lived in one apartment passed around some food. Many of the Europeans had
cellphones that allowed them to get text messages from Europe about the large
quake. Four hours after the tsunami, we were finally learning the extent of the
catastrophe. We spent the rest of the afternoon until dusk there, talking to
the other refugees.
The first prediction of a 3 PM
tsunami passed, then the second prediction of a 5 PM tsunami also did not pan
out. I read for a while. Several times there was a commotion on the road down
below as trucks, cars and motorbikes would flee away from the beach, taking up
both lanes of the road. The trigger for the panic was never clear. At 3 PM a
policeman appeared on the road about half way to the beach. I watched through
binoculars as he diverted traffic away from the beach, but allowed pedestrians
to pass in either direction. We thought this was a further sign of an impending
new tsunami, but we never knew the reason. After 15 minutes the policeman
disappeared, and traffic resumed as before.
As dusk approached, the three of us
decided to have a quick dinner at a hillside hotel restaurant. Although the
hillside apartments had electricity, the hotel did not, so we ate quickly by
candlelight. We then walked back to the hotel by the light of the car traffic.
Our hotel had partial power, presumably from generators, so there was light,
but no air conditioning. The hotel staff and their Thai friends who volunteered
to help had pulled together 2 large pots of rice and Thai curry that they
offered for free to guests in the lobby.
We sat around and talked with other
guests to try to fill in the picture of the tsunami. We learned that at our
sector of the beach, enough people sounded the alarm when the ocean receded
that everyone ran from the tsunami. That was not true on other sectors of the
beach where some people lingered or even approached the exposed sea floor out
of curiosity. We heard many stories of suffering. One couple at the hotel had
been walking on the beach. The wife made it back, but the husband was swept out
to sea. A twelve-year old girl had rows of parallel scrapes. She had been
submerged and a car scraped over her. The stories went on. There were
handwritten signs at the reception desk from people searching for missing loved
ones.
We later learned from Rolf that
after we went to bed, the hotel staff told Rolf about 1AM that there was
another tsunami coming and that the hotel would have to be evacuated. He was
finally reunited with his wife who had spent the day in the hospital with two
damaged vertebrae, but they and the other guests who heard the 1 a.m. tsunami
warning, had to spend the night on the hillside. We never heard a knock at our
room.
At about 3 AM I awoke with a
horrible cramp in my right calf. It lasted for over two hours. I attribute it
to allowing myself to get dehydrated during the scramble to look for victims,
and the fact that the bottom half of my right flip flop sandal had been sucked
off in the mud.
Throughout the next two days a very
odd thing happened. Unlike the usual isolation among hotel guests, most people
wanted to talk to each other, and perfect strangers were particularly eager to
talk to Mardie and me since we had mobilized first aid efforts. The men who
volunteered to carry the makeshift stretchers gave each other a knowing nod as
they passed in the hall.
Air conditioning and water were
restored to our room mid-day Monday. After breakfast we walked to the beach for
the first time and surveyed the wreckage of the beachfront hotels. At the Sea
Gull hotel, multiple cars were piled up against the seaward walls, and one car
had slammed into the building perpendicularly so that it came to rest inside
the guest room. It was obvious that anyone who could not find a stairway to an
upper floor would not have survived the series of debris-laden waves. Work
crews were cleaning some wreckage and pumping water out of several buildings,
presumably looking for bodies.
We put our feet in the Andaman Sea
and then headed back to our hotel to rest for the day. Mardie picked up a
small, oil stained plastic dove. The water was calm and inviting, but no one
was swimming in the sea that had erupted so violently a few hours before. Back
at our hotel, the main pool was filled with debris, but a smaller, slightly
elevated pool was a place of surreal refuge for many of the guests.
On Tuesday, December 28 we took an
early taxi to the airport thinking that the road though the center of Patong
Beach would be congested or blocked and that the airport would be crowded. In
fact the inland route through town had only a little flood debris, and the
airport was not particularly crowded. The Thai Airlines ticket agent said that
20 agents had been brought in from Bangkok on Monday, and 10 additional flights
had been added for the mass exodus. There was an Italian Air Force C-141 and a
Thai cargo plane on the tarmac. But other than that, the only evidence of
anything unusual was the occasional tourist with bruises or multiple
lacerations on the legs.
One of the video clips that BBC
World News and other media have been showing is a view looking down from a very
tall building. The clip shows a tall tsunami wave hitting several 3-4 story
hotels and then a surge of debris and water enveloping the lower floors and
moving inland down a street to the left of the screen. That video was taken on
our beach about half a mile north of our hotel. Thai TV and BBC had been
showing that newsclip hourly, but I had no idea how much play the whole
disaster received in the US media until we got back to Bangkok.
===============================
Random afterthoughts
The big error everyone made in
Phuket on December 26 was assuming that the earthquakes before the tsunamis
were small and local. Best guess is that in southern Thailand we felt the main
shock (magnitude 9) and a large aftershock (magnitude 7.1 off the Nicobar
islands). The best course of action when your are at the coast and you feel an
earthquake, is to evacuate to high ground or climb to a higher level in a
concrete building immediately (unless you have solid news of no danger).
Tsunami waves might arrive in seconds.
Everyone needs to spend half an hour
at home organizing a household emergency plan. This is especially relevant for
those of us in Pacific rim countries who live in earthquake and tsunami
country. An example of what to consider is at: http://www.doh.wa.gov/phepr/handbook/family.htm.
It is not clear that the first aid I
administered actually saved anyone's life. It eventually struck me that anyone
who suffered a severe bleed or other trauma from the first tsunami wave was
very unlikely to be able to climb to the second floor of the beachfront
buildings before the second, larger wave arrived. Getting people out of the
waterfront buildings as we did, would definitely have saved their lives if a
later set of larger waves came in (especially if the incoming tide were higher
during this full moon). On the other hand, if much larger waves struck while
the volunteers from my hotel were hauling the improvised stretchers, we might
have suffered further casualties. This has happened in Japan when firemen have
arrived at a tsunami disaster too soon after the initial waves.
By daylight on Monday, December 27,
I realized that we had been lucky in many more ways than I appreciated on
Sunday. Obviously, our late arrival and sleeping in late were the important
factor that kept us off the beach when the waves hit. We had considered taking
an early dive boat on Sunday, but those boats would have arrived in shallow
reefs precisely when the tsunami hit. Not being in a beachfront hotel was
clearly a big plus for us, as was the wide, undeveloped lawn and garden that
buffered our hotel from the beachfront. But even more important was the fact
that the concrete hotels immediately in front of us were 2-4 stories tall and
built side by side. So they effectively created a concrete sea wall that
absorbed almost all of the initial violent impact on our part of the beach. The
narrow gap between the Sea Gull and the Paitin hotels might have allowed the
full force of the waves to strike our building, but that gap was instantly
plugged by cars and debris (see photo above). Thus, the tsunami waves could
only reach our hotel by narrow jets of water penetrating through the ground
floor of the beachfront hotels and the huge surge of water swirling around the
north end of the hotel strip, along the main road inland, and then over the
large lawn. This slowed down the water considerably.
Looking at the news photos of Phi
Phi Island, I wonder if the less substantial beachfront buildings there could
have been a factor in the more extensive damage inland (initial reports from
geologists suggest that the the tsunami waves were 5 meters high where we were
at Patong Beach, and 5-6 meters high at Phi Phi). Also the tourist village at
Phi Phi island is on a low beach saddle, whereas the beach at Patong is below a
small seawall that probably absorbed some of the waves' energy. The tsunami
waves were quite variable over the region, presumably due to differences in
local seabed topography. On Phuket Island, Patong and Kamala beaches were badly
affected, but many other beaches were untouched. Khao Lak, to the north of
Phuket island had waves 10-11 meters high (see aerial photo above).
According to the New York Times
on January 5, 90% of the hotel rooms at Patong Beach were back in service, but
not surprisingly, hotel occupancy was only 38%. At Khao Lak it may take a year
for hotels to reopen. The press reported extensive, long-term damage to reef
and mangrove ecosystems (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Jan. 17, 2005). But
surveys by scientists and dive shop operators found that reef damage was quite
variable, and many deeper reefs were not that heavily impacted (Science 2005, 307:657; http://www.scubacat.com/divesiteupdate.html).
Salt water intrusion into lakes, streams, and ground water will have a long
term impact on water supplies and ecosystems in many areas.
One advantage we had in this
disaster was that unlike in the USA, the hotel rooms had lots of bottled water.
So even though the piped water was not working, there was plenty of bottled
water for cleaning wounds and hydrating survivors.
Communications and information flow
is often a problem cited after disasters. The language barrier in Phuket
created a number of problems during the day. My family almost brought a
cellphone with international roaming capability as well as two FRS radios, but
decided not to at the last minute. We had talked about calling Hal Mofjeld at
NOAA/Seattle to get an expert opinion on the tsunami risk before we walked back
down from the hillside to our hotel Dec. 26.
I was so focused on finding the next
severely injured person and maintaining safe footing when I traveled around the
beachfront hotels that I forgot a basic point of mountaineering: always look
back at every trail intersection so you know how to get back if you have to.
That failure created delays in getting back to the SeaGull hotel that could
have proven costly if another tsunami had hit during the rescue.
The medical system was swamped,
given that over 1000 people were severely wounded in Phuket province the first
day (in addition to over 260 dead and 700 missing). But hospitals were even
worse off in the province to the north where there were far more casualties. I
later received an email from some of the survivors I had helped (the English
family I first saw at the beachfront hotels). They said that their wounds were
promptly attended to when they reached the Phuket emergency room, although they
required multiple surgeries and were still recuperating 4 weeks later. I asked
them how they wound up where I found them. The response: "We were not
staying in either hotel but had been on the beach then walked across the road
only to be pushed through a shop window. The shop was standing in front of the
hotel but was demolished by the wave! Hence the hotels were just a convenient
shelter. We were all lifted/clambered up on to "my" balcony first,
then the girls moved to the higher ground where you found them after rumours of
a larger wave coming. As you'll remember I wasn't in a fit state for more
climbing."
The Thai ambulance crews were
reassuring once they were able to reach the waterfront hotels near us (about 3
hours after the tsunami). I don't know how they prioritized evacuating the
wounded from various sectors of Patong. Telephone service had been cut off, and
nobody at our hotel seemed to have a radio or other means of contacting the 2
hospitals. The only question I had about how the ambulances operated was
whether it would have been better to evacuate the injured from the back of the
hotels instead of the front beach side, in case another big wave hit. The Thais
brought in relief teams of surgeons and other personnel by Monday. The Thai
news did discuss the need for psychological counseling among survivors, but the
media also said that the country had very little capacity in mental health
services.
Several of the European tourists
were urging us to use whiskey or vodka to clean wounds. I told them that was
not a good idea. Here is what a University of Washington colleague who is a
trauma surgeon and epidemiologist told me, "If some sort of definitive
care is to be done within the next few hours, the only real first aid priority
is to stop bleeding, primarily through direct pressure (manual or with gauze or
bandages or any sort of cloth) or compression of pressure points (e.g., femoral
artery in groin for bleeding more distally in the leg, etc). If definitive care
will not be for a long time (e.g., day or more) and the wound is grossly
contaminated (e.g., dirt or other material with high bacterial contamination),
and bleeding has already been controlled, then brief mechanical debridement
(e.g., as by irrigation with clean water) would be indicated. There is no
benefit from antiseptic (especially one like alcohol) at this stage. Soap and
water, possibly OK...but the main need is to remove debris, not sterilization.
Something painful, like alcohol, would probably not cause much damage, but
would cause unnecessary pain, with no real benefit."
The Easter Sunday earthquake 4
decades ago in southern Alaska was about as big as this one but caused far less
damage because the area had few people. The largest earthquake ever measured
(9.5 off Chile in 1960) generated a tsunami, but only a few thousand people
died because the earthquake and tsunamis affected sparsely populated areas (http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/).
The risk of damage and lives lost in the Indian and Pacific Ocean Basins is
going to get far worse as human population growth continues and as individuals
choose to live near the coast. The population of Thailand is estimated to
increase by only 15% in the next 45 years, but the population of India could
increase by 50% and in Somalia by 207% at current rates (www.prb.org).
Without warning systems, public education, and a balanced approach to
development in coastal areas, the risk of damage will most likely be higher
from future tsunamis and earthquakes in the region. Destruction of mangroves
and coral reefs in coastal areas further increases the risk by reducing natural
buffer zones (http://worldwatch.org/pubs/paper/158/).
The United States has a history in
the last 20 years of very limited contributions of foreign aid---in fact one of
the lowest rates of contribution among major developed countries, i.e., less
than $50 per person per year, less than 0.1% of our Gross National Product and
seven times lower than many European countries. In fact, much of our foreign
"aid" is military aid or economic assistance funding which simply
offsets debt rather than provide direct assistance to help poor people get on
their feet. There are plenty of unmet needs and missed opportunities. For
example, 1 million children die each year from measles worldwide, and there are
140 million unplanned pregnancies per year. Yet the USA dramatically reduced
our commitments to some of the most effective foreign aid programs: UNFPA (the
United Nations Population Fund, http://www.unfpa.org/, and the International
Planned Parenthood Federation, http://www.ippf.org/). After fomenting wars in
Central America two decades ago, we backed off of reconstruction aid. The big
publicity around new international AIDS resources has not been followed up with
all the funding promised. Reconstruction aid to Honduras after Hurricane Mitch
has been limited. The list goes on.
So making lofty commitments during
the major publicity phase of tsunami recovery is great, but we need to be sure
that the federal government follows through with those pledges. We also need to
be sure that the current U.S. administration does not simply rob existing,
poorly funded foreign aid accounts to finance the acute relief effort. Now is
the time for a larger national dialogue on foreign aid and our relationship
with less developed countries.
A final note: the Thai people we met before,
during and after the tsunami were wonderful. Although there were later reports
of looting, what we witnessed were hundreds of people streaming to the
shoreline areas to volunteer to help. We want to go back.
USEFUL WEB SITES (some descriptions
copied from CDC)
Tsunamis such as those that recently
hit South Asia can have serious public health consequences. This page provides
information on those issues as well as specific information on the events in
South Asia. http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/tsunamis/
Interim Vaccination and Malaria
Prophylaxis Recommendations for Persons Traveling to Areas Affected by the
Tsunami. This link contains the most current immunization, prophylaxis and
prevention recommendations for travelers to the affected regions. http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/tsunamis/vaccination.asp
Interim Health Recommendations for
Workers Who Handle Human Remains. New Human remains may contain blood-borne
viruses such as hepatitis viruses and HIV, and bacterial pathogens that cause
diarrheal diseases. This page provides information for people who must directly
handle remains, such as recovery personnel, or persons identifying or preparing
remains for burial or cremation. http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/tsunamis/handleremains.asp
Infectious Disease Concerns Associated
with the Indian Ocean Tsunamis. The following link provides a list of
infectious diseases known to exist in some of the countries affected by the
recent tsunamis. The environmental conditions left by the tsunamis may
contribute to the transmission of some of these diseases. http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/tsunamis/diseases.asp
Mark Oberle, MD, MPH
School of Public Health and Community Medicine
University of Washington, Box 357230
Seattle, WA 98195-7230
Tel: (206) 616-9394; 543-1144
E-mail: moberle@u.washington.edu
Labels: 2004 tsunami survivor story, Mark Oberle, phuket tsunami survivor, real tsunami story, The Impossible
