The air was soft and the sun was warm. The sea was unusually calm. Having breakfast last Sunday in the Yala Safari Game Lodge overlooking a lagoon was Uditha Hettige.
“All of a sudden the birds started flying off in a big commotion. There were too many to have been disturbed by a crocodile, so I looked up,” he said.
Tourists, many of them British, were celebrating Christmas on the island, thronging Yala and other coastal resorts. Lovers were lying on the beaches, swimmers were splashing in the cobalt blue waters, divers were exploring the coral reefs and fishermen were repairing their nets.
“I looked up towards the sea 150 metres away,” said Hettige, “and saw water coming at great speed.”
Unlike thousands of other locals and tourists, Hettige, a Sri Lankan naturalist, knew instantly what he had to do.
“I knew I had to run. I ran out of the hotel and kept on running and never looked back,” he said.
A small boy had fallen flat on his face. Hettige scooped the child up and kept on running, the water closing. With the boy on his shoulders he climbed up a tree. Still the water kept rising, a black turgid maelstrom that tore the wedding ring from his finger and threatened to tear him from the tree.
People, cars and all the flotsam of the town were being hurled a little over a mile away inland and up to 50ft high into the trees. The waters surged again.
“To the left of me another gigantic wave came crashing in. I was clinging to the tree with both hands. It was no good. I was forced to let go of the boy. There was nothing more I could do to save him.”
The child, like so many thousands of others in a tragedy unfolding across 10 countries, disappeared, swallowed by a sea that had not been so cruel for more than a century.
Within the space of a few hours the Indian Ocean destroyed villages, towns and tourist resorts. It smashed boats and buildings and sucked people, almost 40% of them children, into the depths.
The sea snatched the lives of more than 120,000 — perhaps 150,000, but officials say the toll has become uncountable — leaving millions homeless and spreading heartbreak far across the world.
How could such a terrible tragedy have burst from so beautiful a day and why were there no warnings?
THE answers begin thousands of feet beneath the ocean surface around the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where the sea bed is always slowly moving.
The vast slab of ocean floor known as the Indian tectonic plate grinds against the Burma plate, being forced downwards into the Earth’s molten mantle, part of the endless process of the Earth renewing itself.
Usually the plate slides gently downwards about 2½ inches a year — but parts can jam, sometimes for decades, even centuries. By last weekend the pressure of billions of tons of rock off northern Sumatra had built to immense and intolerable levels.
Shocking as it seems now, scientists already knew that after years of relative quiet a large and violent adjustment was looming.
Studies of coral atolls had shown clusters of giant earthquakes in the region occurring about every 230 years. The last cluster had begun in 1797 and ended in 1861.
When such big undersea earthquakes do strike, giant tidal waves, given the name tsunamis by the Japanese, are sure to follow.
In 2003, one Australian expert at an international meeting on tsunamis had pushed for a warning system in the Indian Ocean. He feared that disaster was not far off.
Just three weeks ago Dr Kerry Sieh, an American expert, presented a paper at a conference in San Francisco warning that the next giant earthquake off Sumatra might be only a few years away. It could, he said, lift the ocean floor up to 6ft, causing a “large tsunami and substantial changes to the coastal environments of the islands”.
It sounded rather abstract and, as experts agreed, the quake might not happen for decades. But Sieh had been concerned enough to distribute posters in Sumatra to educate the islanders about the enormous devastation that large quakes and tsunamis could cause.
“Our islands are sinking,” it read, “because of earthquakes.” It showed a graphic image of a tsunami overwhelming a house.
Sieh even toured the area lecturing officials about the dangers, but nobody seemed to take much notice. To many Indonesians, and the many foreigners who travel to Asia, the warnings — if they even saw them — probably seemed overblown.
They knew that the region was prone to volcanic activity and to quakes, but most were localised affairs. Every day there were minor tremors that barely registered or else went unnoticed.
So when Bayu Pranata, the local geophysics officer in Padang, central Indonesia, began his shift last Sunday morning he was expecting nothing unusual.
At 7.58am he was disturbed by a sudden “tak tak tak” noise. He looked out of the window first, before realising that the sound was emanating from a machine recording seismic activity. Pranata was stunned. He judged the quake to measure about 8 on the Richter scale.
“I was confused, worried and panicked,” he said later. Fearing that the quake could cause a tsunami, he telephoned the National Earthquake Centre in Jakarta — but was unable to get through.
The clash of tectonic plates some six miles beneath the ocean floor was reverberating far and wide. A few minutes later a computer beeped at an observatory in Nagano, Japan, alerting Masashi Kobayashi.
“I thought it was huge,” he said later. “Our equipment calculated that its magnitude was over 8, which happens only a few times a year.”
The sophisticated system automatically compared the quake with the data available on 100,000 previous tremors and Kobayashi fired off an alert to the headquarters of the Japanese meteorological agency in Tokyo.
Halfway across the Pacific, computer alarms also sounded and staff pagers beeped at a seismic centre in Honolulu. The first scientist staring at the blue seismic lines thought that “it was big, maybe a 7”. But within 15 minutes he and his colleagues had revised the estimate to 8 on the Richter scale. It was a huge quake, but not necessarily disastrous.
They issued a routine bulletin predicting small changes in sea level but added “there is no tsunami warning in effect”. The bulletin referred only to the Pacific. But the massive amount of energy unleashed beneath the ocean floor off Sumatra had been badly underestimated. Vital time was slipping by before the seismologists began revising upwards their estimates of the earthquake’s power — first to 8.5 and ultimately to 9 — which, under the exponential Richter scale, is 32 times more powerful than an 8.
Even when the full enormity of the quake sank in, the scientists were at a loss to know what to do. It was a holiday weekend and they had no telephone numbers for the relevant authorities to contact in the countries thousands of miles away that faced devastation.
“We tried to do what we could,” said Charles McCreery, director of the Honolulu centre. “We don’t have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world.”
Other fatal slips were being made elsewhere. In Australia an automatic computer alert sent a seismology officer rushing to his office. Within 33 minutes of the quake he issued a warning of a tsunami — but sent it only to Australian embassies.
National officials in other countries were not warned, apparently for fear of breaching “diplomatic protocol”.
In India, the meteorological department dispatched a fax to warn a government minister — but sent it to the wrong person.
Perhaps the most sensitive equipment registering the earthquake was the network of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation which has its headquarters in Vienna. Using 300 monitoring points around the world, it gauges seismic activity, underwater disturbances and changes in the atmosphere.
It should have been well placed to judge the size of the quake and to warn countries around the Indian Ocean that a massive undersea disturbance had occurred.
However, the machines whirred on unmanned and unobserved; the staff were on holiday. Like so many other locals and tourists in countries around the Indian Ocean, they were oblivious to the terrible destruction now rippling out across the sea.
CLOSE to the epicentre of the quake lies the tiny island of Palau Weh where Al Howard, a British former Gurkha officer, and Sophie Pasquier, his French girlfriend, were celebrating Christmas with a break at a diving resort.
They were sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s celebrations while other tourists were strolling down to the beach. As Howard dozed, his bungalow shook violently.
“I thought it might be a volcanic eruption, that it was Krakatoa, but then I realised it was an earthquake,” said Howard, a sales director with Airbus, the aerospace group. “Water was suddenly 10ft away from the hut — and we were 50ft above sea level.”
When the water receded, Howard and Pasquier ventured down towards the shore where the resort had stood. “There was,” he said, “nothing left.”
The tsunami thrown up by the quake had obliterated the village. Down at the beach, benches had been uprooted and hurled 30 yards uphill. Water had punched through a thick concrete wall at a diving school as if it were cardboard.
Beyond the quake’s epicentre west of Sumatra, the great undersea fault curves northwards for hundreds of miles through the ocean towards the Bay of Bengal. Sitting astride it is the string of small islands known as the Andamans. At numerous points along their line smaller quakes and aftershocks were taking place, adding to the tsunamis rippling out.
On Car Nicobar, one of the smaller Andaman isles, a local woman called Bharti had left her tin shack early in the morning to fetch water. Suddenly the earth shook, either with the main quake or with an aftershock.
“There were these gigantic cracks in the ground, water was coming through the cracks. Lots of people fell into the cracks,” she said.
“Then a gigantic wave came rushing towards us and we were swept along into the trees.” A man pulled Bharti and her daughter from the swirling waters; but there was no sign of her husband or son.
According to K B Rao, another resident, the wave was higher than a house.
“There was this incredible rumble, like a jet plane,” he said. “Then there was a pause. I got out and sat down next to the house. Then another great roaring and we looked up to see the wall of water 35ft high coming at incredible speed. We ran.”
The wave was big enough to decapitate the air traffic control tower on the island’s tiny air base. Rao and others survived only by scrambling up a radar gantry, although it began to buckle under the weight of people clinging to it.
When the flood had later receded Casper James, another local resident, ventured back towards his village. It, too, had been obliterated. “There was nothing left,” he said. “Just hands sticking out of the sand.”
East of these remote and thinly populated islands lay the southern peninsula of Thailand, a tropical paradise that cheap flights had turned into a playground for tens of thousands of holidaymakers from the developed world.
IT workers and City bankers, backpackers and middle-class families had escaped the stress and chill of home for palm-lined sands under crystalline skies.
Boxing Day had dawned bright and clear, and for many tourists a gentle swim or some lazing on the beach beckoned.
They had no idea that seven years ago Samith Dhamasaroj, Thailand’s top meteorologist, had warned government officials that a tidal wave could hit these southern resorts around the tourist town of Phuket.
“I predicted the possibility,” Dhamasaroj confirmed last week, “but nobody paid any attention.” He had made two recommendations: that alarm sirens be installed in hotels and that resort buildings should not be sited within 300 yards of the beaches.
The government had ignored the advice and moved Dhamasaroj to another post. As the Thai tourist industry boomed, more and more resorts had sprung up along the beaches.
So for Gavin Anderson, 41, and his fiancée Jo Colman, 31, it was only a few steps from their hotel onto the beach at Khao Lak, a resort north of Phuket.
“We were lying on the beach having just walked down from the hotel after breakfast,” said Colman. “All of a sudden the tide went right out and the water was sucked out to sea. It was really strange and people started taking pictures.”
They wanted a holiday snap to show disbelieving folks back home what looked almost like the parting of the waters by Moses. In this early morning paradise, it seemed inconceivable that enormous violence was about to be unleashed.
“Then we saw the water rising like a wall out to sea. The locals knew something was wrong and started shouting ‘move, move’.”
The bay at Khao Lak and the shape of the sea bed there had created a tsunami of particular ferocity.
Just up the beach, Christopher Coleridge Cole, a financial adviser, was gearing up for a day of watersports with his children Ben, 18, Freddie, 16, and Alexa, 11. Cole’s wife Belinda was still in their room, putting on a dark blue bikini.
As Cole and his children stood by a building amid the palms, the first wave smashed over the beach and hurled them off their feet.
“It flung us inland. I got up a tree, my children got up a tree, then the next wave crashed in and we came off again,” said Cole. Alexa disappeared under the boiling water. Ben plunged beneath the maelstrom and saved her. Then she was sucked under again. Again her brother saved her.
The force of the flood drove them into a mangrove where they scrambled onto dry land battered and concussed.
Cole, bruised and bewildered, found that he could not walk. His Achilles tendon had snapped. All around was ruin — then bizarrely they found a scrap of comfort.
“There was debris everywhere, it was quite surreal,” said Cole. “Ben found a fridge that had been washed up and opened it. Inside were two bottles of water, thank God, and we drank them.”
But there was no sign of his wife. For more than a day Cole was left fearing she was dead until, through contacts in Singapore, he learnt that she had survived.
He eventually found her at a police post beyond the devastated resorts, battered but dressed in a striking pink T-shirt.
A few yards from where Cole had been standing, George Bromilow had a fraction more of a warning about the tidal wave. He leapt into a car but the flood was racing in too fast.
“We managed to get out of the car and up to the roof of the main hotel building,” he said. “Then we watched as all the other buildings just went — went with people on top of them as the wave crashed through.
“Then another wave came about five minutes later that was a lot higher and went over the top of us.
“Our building just cracked in half. Bodies were swirling through. It was so sad. They were lovely people, really lovely people, tossed around like puppets.”
Sheltering on the rooftop beside Bromilow, his friend George Galiegos dropped dead, apparently from a heart attack. Before Bromilow could do anything, another cascade of water crashed in, washing him off the roof and into the palms.
“It took me several hundred yards away,” he said. “The next moment the palm trees were standing there and everything was very still.”
He looked out over devastation. A Thai coastal patrol boat caught broadside on by the waves had been tumbled over and over and finished hundreds of yards inshore.
Corpses littered the beach and streets. Scores of others had been swept out to sea. At least 700 people in that one resort were dead or missing.
Similar mayhem was striking all along the coast. On Phi Phi island near Phuket, Michael Ludlow, 39, was asleep in his bungalow when the tsunami struck.
“I was washed off the bed and hit the ceiling. Then I was sucked through the back wall. I grabbed on to a tree but it broke.” His legs were deeply lacerated, but his life was saved when a stranger managed to pluck him from the waters.
Keira Colman from Cork found herself trapped inside her bungalow. “Before I knew what to do, the bungalow was swept away down the street with me inside it,” she said.
“I was trapped between the door and the wall. As the bungalow picked up speed it started to sink and I was pushed underwater. I came up and got a gulp of air, then I was pulled back down and was spinning around under water. I was sure I was going to drown.”
She was lucky. The bungalow crashed into another building and she managed to struggle out. In the waters around there were bodies everywhere.
In Phuket, Jillian Searle, an Australian, faced the most awful of choices as she was swept away with her two young boys. “I knew that if I held on to both we would all die,” she said. “I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I had better let go of the one that’s oldest.”
She held tight to her two-year-old son and begged another woman to grab Lachie, her five-year-old. But the boy slipped from the woman’s grasp and Searle, frantic, thought that she had let her son go to his death. It was only hours later, after a gut-wrenching search through the body-strewn resort, that they found him alive.
Crying out for his mother, he had grabbed a door handle and clung to it, his head just above the water.
“He told us he was doggy paddling as fast as he could, because that’s all he knew,” said Searle. “He was so brave. We cannot believe how lucky we are.”
Amid such miraculous escapes, however, many tragedies were unfolding.
In Phuket, Louise Willgrass, a housewife from Norfolk, stepped out of a car to buy some sun cream just as the wave struck. Her husband Nigel and their four children survived, but she was trapped in a shop and drowned.
Gaynor and Christopher Mullen, on their honeymoon, were missing feared dead. The family of Lord Attenborough was torn apart with his daughter and 14-year-old granddaughter killed.
By the time the waves had receded, thousands were dead in Thailand alone and tens of thousands more were missing. But the tsunami was far from over.
THE last giant tidal wave to wreak havoc right across the Indian Ocean happened in 1883 when a volcano on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa exploded. It is famous for a massive eruption that darkened the skies for days.
Less well known is that the massive explosion also caused a tsunami that travelled across the ocean and hit Sri Lanka. Arthur C Clarke, the science fiction writer who lives in Sri Lanka, wrote about it in one of his early books, but it was such a rare occurrence that the mega-tsunami became largely forgotten.
Tsunamis are a phenomenon that few people properly appreciate. Unlike ordinary waves, whipped up by the wind, they are not confined to the surface of the sea.
When an earthquake lifts the ocean floor, it heaves up a mass of water thousands of feet deep which then falls back. As the sea flattens out again, gigantic ripples race outwards. A tsunami is born — and the energy contained in billions of cubic metres of moving water is enormous.
In the open ocean the vast ripple can travel at 500mph yet may be barely detectable from above. On the surface it appears only as a long, low swell whose crests may be hundreds of miles apart and only a few feet high. Beneath those crests, however, a leviathan is on the move — and when that mass ploughs into the shallows it is forced up into huge, rearing walls of death.
The momentum is so great that the tsunami can travel great distances without dissipating. In 1960 an earthquake off the coast of Chile generated a tsunami that travelled 10,000 miles over 22 hours all the way to Japan, where it killed 150 people.
As southern Thailand lay shattered from the first assault, tsunamis of a similar scale were spreading west across the deep, seeking new victims.
Out on the Indian Ocean all seemed calm. A drilling ship, the Discoverer Seven Seas, was about 100 miles from land in 3,000ft of water when a tsunami passed. One of its crew, Bob Forrest, noticed a large swell about two metres high. Other swells from aftershocks followed.
But out there in the deep they did not seem menacing.
By now, an hour or so after the main quake, experts knew that it had been been huge and that the risk of tsunamis was high. Still little was done to warn people.
No general warning got through. On the populous coasts of Sri Lanka and India nobody was aware of the awesome destructive power racing towards them.
It took the tsunami about an hour and a half to reach Sri Lanka, where life was proceeding in its customary unhurried way. On the coastal railway from Colombo down to the southern town of Galle, a train believed to be packed with 1,700 passengers, some of them foreign holidaymakers, was snaking its way slowly along.
For most of its length the railway runs within a few hundred yards of Sri Lanka’s west coast, sometimes within sight of the beach. It is usually a pleasant, relaxing journey, known for its inspiring seascapes.
A few miles from Hikkaduwa, the island’s original hippie hang-out, the train suddenly stopped.
“I could hear screaming and shouting and all the passengers were looking outside,” said Shenth Ravindra, who was on the train. “We could see a lot of women running towards the railway line and turning left. I could see real terror on their faces and thought it might be a terrorist attack.
“Then I heard the water rushing towards us with a crash 100 times louder than the crash of a wave hitting the shore. I could feel the rush and the momentum of it coming closer, engulfing the screaming of the people all around.”
The wave hurled his carriage off the track and onto its side. Struggling in water up to his neck, he dragged himself through an opening and ran just as a second tsunami ploughed in from the ocean. It was, he said, “so big that it was taking up the whole of the horizon”.
Danny Shahaf, from London, was in a part of the train that at first stayed upright. Parents began to push their children out of the windows, hoping that this would give them a better chance of survival. Then the carriage keeled over, crushing many of the youngsters.
Another wave hurled it 100 yards from the track and filled it with water. Shahaf managed to push a friend out of a window and also tried to drag out a woman with a baby, but fell down.
“It was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I thought, this is how I am going to die,” he said. “But I kept saying to myself, I’m not ready to die yet. I have so much to do.
“Then the water receded and by some miracle the friend I had pushed out of the train fell back inside the carriage alive. I saw the woman with the baby I had tried to rescue on the floor holding her child and an American woman was also lying there with her daughter holding hands.
“When I came out of the train there were bodies everywhere, mainly children.”
Perhaps as many as 1,500 people died in that one train. All along the area’s southern coast many thousands more were dying.
Gamel Silua described how his 72-year-old father, one of the country’s famous stilt fishermen who perch on stakes out at sea and fish with rod and line, was swept away by the tsunami. “One moment he was there. The next he was gone,” he said. “We have never found his body.”
Inland, however, many people remained unaware of the devastation. Scott Convoy, a 37-year-old Briton, found himself swept far from the beach right up into a mangrove swamp.
“The wave tore all my clothes off,” he said. “It was the washing machine effect.”
Badly injured, he managed to drag himself further inland to a road where he was found, naked, by rescuers who could not understand what had happened to him.
Many others, however, did not escape. Even in the north of the island there were reports of a terrible toll, partly because of the low-lying land, partly because the region has been beset by civil war.
Some civilians in the Jaffna peninsula apparently mistook the roar of the wave for a government bombing raid — and fell to the ground as they had been told to do during an attack. The wall of water killed them where they lay.
An orphanage sheltering about 170 children was reported by the Tamils to have been destroyed with no survivors. The leadership of the Tamils say that as many as 15,000 people are dead or missing, although the Sri Lankan government puts the figure considerably lower.
Amid the ghastly ruins and remains there was just one small consolation. Only weeks before the disaster Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tiger guerrilla leader, had been threatening to resume the 20-year war against the government.
Now, as the horror sank in, the two sides edged together and Prabhakaran expressed his condolences to the southern Sinhalese, his sworn enemies.
Still the deadly waves rolled on. Further to the north a tsunami was pounding the coast of India, killing more than 7,000. To the south it swept over the Maldives. Everywhere it left death and destruction in its wake.
Yet it could have been so different, and so many lives might have been saved, as the experience of Kenya shows.
By the time the tsunami had travelled 3,500 miles and was nearing the coast of east Africa, news of the dreadful toll in Asia had preceded it. The waves still wreaked death and destruction, especially in Somalia, but in Kenya the authorities had sufficient warning and initiative to act.
Local police evacuated the sandy tourist beaches of Mombasa and elsewhere, and by the time the wave struck the shore was empty. Only one person died.
AT the heart of the disaster there was worse to come. Once the killer waves had gone and the floods subsided, the full impact and extent of the tidal waves began to emerge only slowly. And as survivors waited for help, new horrors lay in store.
Back in Phuket, George Bromilow sat amid the detritus in a daze.
“Two lorries came into the hotel area at about 4pm,” he recalled. “Then some men jumped out and told everybody to get out of the hotel. They gave us a story that another big wave was going to strike at 12 midnight. They were very insistent that we get out of the rooms and leave all the doors open.”
Everybody left except Bromilow, who went to check whether anybody else remained in the ruined hotel.
“When I got up there I found a lot of blood and a complete mess where the bodies had washed through. It was very slippery.”
He fell, knocked himself out and lay unconscious for hours. He came to alone and confused in the ruined hotel. It was pitch black. The water had risen again and was slopping through the lower rooms.
“I went into a room and put a mattress against the door — I don’t know what that would have done — but I stayed in there like that for the next five hours,” he said.
“I remembered what the guy had said about the big wave at midnight and I just lay there waiting for midnight and listening to the waves below.”
Midnight passed. Nothing happened.
“I had a celebratory Sprite to toast the non-appearance of the waves,” said Bromilow, “and then the looters arrived at 12.30.”
They came in two groups and he heard them smash their way through the abandoned rooms, where bodies bobbed in pools of water. Then the looters — Bromilow believed that they were Thais but was not sure — realised that one of the foreigners had stayed behind.
They began hammering on his door and yelling at him. “They tried to get the door down and to get me out, then they ransacked the whole of the top floor. They were screaming something like ‘no comprende, no comprende’ but I don’t know why,” he said.
The robbery went on for about two hours. “All the time they were there I thought, that’s it,” said Bromilow. But eventually the looters left. He dozed before executing a very British departure.
“I thought the best thing to do was to pack my suitcase. So I neatly folded all my wet clothes and placed them inside. It seemed ridiculous, walking down to reception carrying my suitcase with dead bodies all around. But it felt like my way of keeping in touch with normality.”
Like most in the disaster zone and beyond, Bromilow had yet to comprehend the full scale of the catastrophe. At first the deaths seemed to number a few thousand. There was no understanding that it was a catastrophe of global proportions.
In Britain, Tony Blair was at Chequers, preparing to go on holiday with his family. After being briefed as reports of the earthquake came in, he called John Prescott, deputy prime minister, Jack Straw, foreign secretary, and Hilary Benn, international development secretary.
It was decided that Blair should continue with his holiday to Egypt. “The magnitude of the disaster wasn’t known at that time,” said one government source. “That only became clear later in the week. The PM deserves a break like everyone else.” Blair flew off to a luxury villa at the New Tower hotel complex overlooking the Red Sea.
Initially Britain had offered a paltry £1m in aid. Not a word was heard from Blair. The leader who had been preparing to make aid for Africa one of his big political initiatives in the run-up to the general election remained curiously silent about helping the victims of this Asian disaster.
The death toll began to climb. But still nobody outside the worst-hit areas understood the carnage at the heart of the tsunami. For the main assault of the ocean had not been on Thailand, Sri Lanka or India but on Indonesia.
One of the first outsiders to discover the awful truth was Howard, a former Gurkha on holiday on the island of Palau Weh who was trying to get back to civilisation. The day after the quake, he and his girlfriend Sophie found a village that had survived the tsunami and hired a fishing boat to take them to Banda Aceh, the large town at the western tip of the Sumatran mainland.
Three and a half hours into the voyage they sailed into a sea of death and detritus, which clogged the propeller.
“As we got within a mile of the coast we saw bodies, cars, snakes floating in the water. There was debris everywhere,” said Howard.
In the harbour of Banda Aceh they climbed ashore to a scene of utter carnage. “It was like a nuclear bomb had hit the place,” said Howard.
“Everything was flattened. I’ve seen bodies before, but nothing like that. We lost count. The destruction was of biblical proportions.”
For two to three hours they stumbled over the shattered remains of the city in silence. There were almost no buildings or roads left. “The city was levelled with just a few damaged buildings still standing. Walking through the carnage was awful. At some points we had to crawl through the rubble with the smashed faces of the dead inches from our own.
“I saw a child on the bonnet of a car. A mother with three children lay together. There was nothing we could do, nobody alive to help.”
In London the government was struggling to keep up with events. Helplines set up for worried relatives by the Foreign Office were overwhelmed with thousands of calls. Many people could not get through.
Shamed by the public’s willingness to give money to help the victims, the government belatedly raised its offer of aid from £1m to £15m.
Blair remained on holiday.
From Egypt he hurriedly rewrote his new year message, but all it said was that “the world is united in sorrow for those affected by one of the biggest natural disasters in our lifetime”. Released on Wednesday it was his first response to the disaster.
While Blair stayed silent, Britain was alive with urgent activity. Aid poured in from the public, while on internet sites, televisions and mobile phones, pleas for news of the missing and messages of hope and sadness flooded out.
THE number of casualties rose inexorably: 10,000, 25,000, 60,000. But still the full extent of the disaster in western Sumatra had not been discovered. The devastation there was so total that there was almost nobody left to report it.
One of the few survivors in Banda Aceh was Ahmad Saiffanur, a soft-spoken 38-year-old civil servant. With his wife and three young children he spent the first five days after the tsunami in a makeshift refugee shelter in the governor’s residence. On Friday he decided that it might be time to return home to his wooden, white-painted house. He was wrong.
He hoped that by now the streets would have been cleared of debris. Instead he found that the clean-up operation had hardly begun.
The corpses of former neighbours lay blackened and bloated after being left all week in the sun. Several of them were children, one a toddler whose stiffened arms were outstretched, as if in supplication. “I suppose my family is lucky,” said Saiffanur, looking stunned. “Lucky to have escaped this.”
Survival, however, brought its own horrors. Fearing outbreaks of disease and food shortages, many inhabitants gave up waiting for relief in the city of the dead and headed inland to the mountainous jungle.
Saiffanur, who like most other residents was wearing a green surgical mask against the stench of decomposing bodies, considered joining the exodus. “We have nothing left here,” he said. “What is there to rebuild?”
The official death toll for Indonesia is estimated at about 80,000; locals believe up to half that number may have died in Banda Aceh alone. Yesterday in parts of the city it was still impossible to walk 10 yards without seeing a corpse. There were bodies floating in the river, on roundabouts and hanging in the trees. What made this apocalyptic landscape all the more shocking was the extent of it. The devastation of flattened wooden buildings stretched on one side of the city as far as the eye could see.
Mangled cars and lorries littered the streets, perched on top of railings or propped against trees. A dead cow lay by a lamppost, its hind leg gnawed to the bone by ravenous dogs.
In coastal communities to the west of Banda Aceh it is believed there may have been even fewer survivors. One official said yesterday that he believed up to 95% of buildings in these fishing communities may have been destroyed.
Perhaps nothing could have saved the people hit by such an enormous catastrophe. Yet maybe even here more people might have escaped.
On the island of Simeulue, reached by an aid flight late last week, they remember a tsunami of 1907 when the island, not far from the epicentre of last week’s quake, suffered thousands of deaths.
Locals never forgot the disaster and it helped them to survive when they felt the quake on Boxing Day.
“It became part of the folklore that as soon as we feel a quake we must run to high land,” said Darmili, a district administrative leader.
“It was clear that trouble was coming. The force of the quake was so strong we suspected a big tsunami would follow. Our local lore reminds us of the danger we live with every day.”
Although it was hard to judge the extent of the damage on Simeulue, Darmili said that the majority of the island’s 70,000 people had heeded the lore and escaped the waves that followed the quake.
But for millions of others all around the Indian Ocean there was, tragically, no such understanding and no warning. There were only a few terrifying moments when nature reminded humankind of its awesome power.
Additional reporting: Damandeep Singh, India, and Mike Pflanz, Kenya
