BRIAN PAGE should have spent yesterday enjoying an early morning surf in the sparkling blue Sri Lankan waters before rejoining his extended family for a leisurely breakfast on the beach.
Instead he spent it wandering around overflowing mortuaries, searching among the corpses for three friends still missing after the massive tsu-nami that caused havoc across the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day. “We just need someone with authority to tell us where to look,” said the father of four as he stood in a ward in Galle’s main hospital.
One of the missing had been swept from the verandah in Mirissa where the family was breakfasting; the other two had not been heard of since their hotel in Hikkaduwa was levelled. “You can’t go back to where you stayed because it’s gone, it’s flattened,” said Mr Page, from Southampton. “You hope for the best but you look everywhere. Just to check, just to see if they are there. There’ s nothing else we can do.”
Thousands along this shattered southern coast, foreign tourists and local people, began their day the same way yesterday: waiting at hospitals struggling to cope with the stream of bloated corpses, scrabbling through the rubble of collapsed buildings or dredging through the muddy waters left behind.
Similar scenes were played out in coastal communities across southern Asia as the death toll from the tsunami passed 23,000 and continued to grow. However, nowhere was hit worse than Sri Lanka, which alone accounted for more than 12,000 of those victims. The Government said that about 200 foreign tourists were feared dead, and as many as 1.5 million people had lost their homes.
From a weed-choked lagoon at Kudawella, south of Galle, a group of men carried the limp figure of a 22-year-old woman and laid it on the ground. They stood around, almost prayerful, gazing on her still form.
She was just the latest of scores of bodies that surfaced in the lagoon after the flood-waters receded. The silence was broken with a howl as a woman in a printed dress burst through the crowd and fell on the corpse. “My sister, my sister,” she howled, beating her chest. “Why, why, why?” Deepetha, the dead woman, had been shopping for food when the wave hit. Her sister pulled the gold rings from her fingers and ears to save them from looters. From a bench, another women watched blankly, cradling her child in her lap. She pulled back the cloth to reveal her calm dead face and began to cry.
Near by, two grey-haired women picked their way through the untended corpses, bracing for recognition as they lifted the clothes covering the faces, relieved when they did not, but still left wondering where their loved ones were.
Such scenes were repeated up and down this devastated coastline where whole villages and livelihoods lay in fragments of brick, wood and glass across the coastal highway, all strewn in the direction that the wave hit.
In Galle, the historic walled port city handed from the Portuguese to the Dutch to the British, the devastation was no less complete.
The thick walls of the 16th-century fort protected those inside but as the waters slid round them and met again on the far side, they did so with terrible force. Coaches tossed from the bus station by the waves lay stranded in the middle of Galle’s international cricket ground. Along the seafront, elegant colonial villas lay toppled like sandcastles. At the main hospital the injuries of the dead bore witness to the ferocity of the wave. The fortunate looked calm, as if carried off asleep. Other were bruised and bloodied after being slammed against buildings. “It was a terrible sight,” Mr Page said after his grim pilgrimage around the wards of the dead.
Galle’s hospital was struggling to cope with 1,100 corpses. Five were foreigners and yet to be identified. “If they are not taken by tomorrow, we will have to do something — bury them because of the risk of disease,” an official said.
Sri Lankans who still had homes standing flung open their doors to stranded foreigners. When the wave hit the guesthouse in Mirissa where Brett Claughter was staying, the owner rushed everyone to his own house, a few kilo- metres uphill and inland, safe from further tides. “I have nothing but praise for the Sri Lankan people,” the Australian said. “They have shown us a kindness you could never hope for at home.”
Ten helicopters and 25,000 soldiers rushed to coastal areas to assist the rescue effort. But little government help has reached towns such as Tangalla and Dickwella south of Galle.
Meanwhile, people remain traumatised by one of the worst natural disasters in memory. As the living cradled the dead in the hospital in Kudawella, a rumour spread that the sea was receding as if to strike again. Nurses and patients ran panic-stricken into the streets. “It is in their minds for ever now,” a doctor said. “They can never forget what they have seen.”
THE TOLL
The death toll across southern Asia reached 23,700 last night.
The worst-hit country was Sri Lanka, with an estimated 12,000 deaths, followed by India with 6,600. But as many as 30,000 people were said to be missing in the Indian-controlled Andaman and Nicobar islands, close to the epicentre of Sunday’s earthquake.
Nearly 5,000 were believed to have been killed in Indonesia, and nearly 1,000 in Thailand. Smaller numbers died in Malaysia, Burma, the Maldive Islands and even Somalia, 3,600 miles from the epicentre. Millions have lost their homes.
THE BRITONS
Fifteen Britons have been confirmed dead and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that the final toll was certain to be far higher.
Diplomats said that ten died in Thailand, two in the Maldives and at least three in Sri Lanka. Another seventy have been reported missing and up to a hundred Britons are in hospital in Phuket.
The first survivors arrived home last night and a further 15 flights from the stricken region are expected today.
