Tsunami death toll passes 125,000

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NZ woman tells of battle for life



31.12.04
by David Fisher of the Herald on Sunday in Phuket


Vanessa Martin pressed her face against the ceiling of her Thai hotel room, gasping for air as seawater surged in through a shattered plate-glass window.

The woman, who is originally from Blenheim, and her British partner, Gary Tait, had been knocked off their feet by a wall of water.

Ms Martin, who suffered a gash along her lower leg severing arteries and tendons, believes she received her injuries when the water blew in the plate glass.

"It was a floor-to-ceiling window that filled with water. As soon as it got to the top, it just crashed in," she said from her hospital bed in Phuket yesterday.

As the water level rose, the pair swam for the ceiling in search of air. Ms Martin´s path was blocked by bedroom furniture floating above her head, but she managed to push her way to the top.

She and Mr Tait had just enough space between water and ceiling to tilt their heads back and breathe.

Between operations for her severed tendons, the 30-year-old described the hours of terror that began in one of Patong Beach´s most exclusive beachfront resorts, the Impiane Phuket Cabana.

Hearing shrieking in the neighbouring semi-detached bungalow, she looked up to see a trickle of water running across the floor.

She believed her neighbour had left a bath running, but then turned to see 1m of water up against the window.

When the water receded from their flooded room, she and Mr Tait were washed out to the beach pool area. It was here that the extent of Ms Martin´s injury became apparent and an Italian tourist used a drawstring from swimming shorts as a makeshift tourniquet.

Then came a second wave - which Mr Tait called "truly frightening". By this time the couple had managed to clamber to a second-storey office area in the resort´s main building.

It was a bastion of last resort, and Mr Tait watched as the water poured in, hoping it would not reach them. For those sheltering in the room, there was nowhere else to go.

Again the water withdrew, taking people with it as Mr Tait watched. Those in the room carried Ms Martin down the stairs and placed her on an inflatable swimming aid, which two Thai men used to tow her to Patong Hospital. Mr Tait followed later, feet cut badly by glass smashed in the swirling water.

Ms Martin was transferred to Bangkok Phuket Hospital, where she was operated on by midnight, followed by a second operation yesterday. She is hoping for a medical evacuation as soon as possible.

Ms Martin, who is based in England, was on her way home to Blenheim to visit her mother, Fay Jones.

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Now, the endless ache of grief

A view of the damage wrought by the tsunami on Khao Lak beach. Picture / Reuters


31.12.04
By KATHY MARKS


Kham Promnich has been sleepwalking for four days. Yesterday, he paced up and down the patch of land where his house once stood, tracing the perimeters of his shattered life.

Promnich was away visiting friends when a 9m wall of water crashed on to Khao Lak beach in southern Thailand and swept inland for half a kilometre, leaving behind a trail of destruction.

When he returned, his house was gone. So were his wife, Janjira, and their two young children.

A small, neat man, aged about 30, Promnich struggled to find words to describe his nightmare.

"Everything has gone," he said, gesturing at the twisted pile of plywood and corrugated iron at his feet.

Then, returning to his reverie, he bent down and picked up a fragment of a child´s toy, examining it closely.

Khao Lak, on the Thai mainland, north of the resort island of Phuket, is the blackest spot in a country in mourning.

It was cut off from rescue efforts for two days because of floods and blocked roads, so the full extent of the damage wrought by the murderous tsunami is only now coming to light.

The 9.6km stretch of beach, studded with upmarket resort hotels, has yielded more than 1800 bodies.

Local authorities expect at least another 1000 to be retrieved from the wreckage of buildings and debris-strewn mangrove fields.

Many foreign visitors perished at Khao Lak. So did countless Thais, attracted to the area by a newly booming tourism industry that was a quieter alternative to the frenetic pace of neighbouring Phuket.

Promnich moved there three years ago from a nearby province, to work as a waiter in a local hotel. His wife was a chambermaid.

They built a house in the shade of a casuarina tree in a small community near the beach. That village is now a wasteland, obliterated by the wave.

A kilometre north, an even more hellish scene unfolds in the heart of Khao Lak, where beachfront resorts and holiday bungalows clustered together, overlooking the Andaman Sea.

The beach is a ruined landscape, eerily quiet, save for the hum of mechanical diggers searching for corpses.

Chunks of masonry litter the sand; among them lie the relics of human lives cut short - mattresses, televisions, a coffee mug, a necklace. Bodies are everywhere, wedged into cracks in the walls of crumpled buildings and floating, blackened and bloated, in the receding floodwaters.

Those excavated lie in untidy heaps on the sand. Others, wrapped in blue tarpaulins or bloodstained sheets, are lined up at the roadside, awaiting transport.

Exhausted rescue workers sit among them, eating their lunch. The stench of death is overpowering.

It is difficult to confront such a desolate vista.

When a bomb explodes, we can vent our anger on the people who planted it.

But it was nature that destroyed this pocket of Thailand, and many other places in Asia.

What can you say or feel about a human tragedy on this scale that is nobody´s fault?

In Khao Lak, the dimensions of the tragedy are sharply delineated.

The wave reached the main north-south highway.

Beyond the highway, buildings and tropical vegetation are untouched. In front, of it lies devastation - but only two storeys up.

The third floors of gutted hotels are intact, with curtains neatly tied back at the windows.

Thousands of Thai people are homeless in Khao Lak, where emergency relief centres have been set up.

Among the tales of grief and loss are glimmers of hope.

Yesterday Suthipong Pha-opal, a local fisherman, was reunited with his 4-year-old son, Vathanyu, who survived for more than two days by clinging to the top of a tree. "It´s a miracle that he´s still alive," said his father.

But the overall mood in Khao Lak is of despair. Outside Takuapa Hospital, 200 decomposing corpses were laid out in the dirt beneath a threadbare canopy, some with hands clasped in front of them as if in prayer.

Local people threaded their way wordlessly between them, scouring unrecognisable features for something familiar.

A young man wailed inconsolably as his family loaded a cheap wooden coffin on to a black pick-up truck.

Another truck drew up beside it, and the driver placed six tiny bundles gently on the ground. They were babies.
[link to www.nzherald.co.nz]



This is just totally, totally tragic... I am numb with grief for these poor people.

With all the 0000s it´s still just a guess. I will be surprised if it´s not 250k and I wouldn´t be surprised if it´s double that. We will never really know. And as has been suggested... disease is yet to come. In the tropics wounds become septic very quickly, and if you have swallowed muddy tropical salt water..in your lungs... I don´t like your chances . Shock, despair, grief ,hunger will all lower your resistence to disease.. and your will to live.

absolutely Ian... and if that weren´t enough they have this to deal with as well...

Tsunami waters raise landmine fears in Sri Lanka


31.12.04


POINT PEDRO - Already haunted by fears of a new tsunami or spread of disease, survivors picking through debris of entire towns to recover corpses at Sri Lanka´s northern tip face a new danger -- floating landmines.

Nestled near a border dividing the north between government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels, the area around the small fishing village of Point Pedro -- devastated by giant tsunami waves on Sunday -- is now littered with plastic landmines uprooted by floodwaters.

"There are land mines spread all over. Many of them have moved, hundreds are floating," said Sinnathurai Kathiravelpillai, a district medical officer working near Point Pedro.

Mine disposal units estimate there are around one million mines scattered mostly around northern Sri Lanka, a legacy of a bloody two-decade civil war that killed 64,000 people until a ceasefire three years ago.

Landmines here are a part of life. Children grow up around road signs warning them not to play with them. Many areas are still cordoned off by yellow tape and skull and crossbones signs. Some residents hobble past on artificial limbs.

Demining teams, including several from abroad, are working in the north to create safe access for residents and aid convoys and have already cleared tens of thousands of mines.

The force of Sunday´s giant waves -- which has killed nearly 23,000 in Sri Lanka and more than 80,000 across Asia and counting -- churned up sand and earth and residents saw hundreds of the mostly plastic devices bobbing on floodwaters.

Other vestiges of Sri Lanka´s protracted civil war dotted the area. Floodwaters washed away Sri Lankan army checkpoints posted along the coastal stretch and twines of rusted razor wire were strewn across roads.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, whose territory begins just a few kilometres away from Point Pedro, say nearly 10,000 people have perished in their northern and eastern coastal strongholds in the wake of Sunday´s disaster -- around half of Sri Lanka´s rising nationwide death toll.

Bloated bodies have been piled into mass graves.

The tsunami, triggered by an underwater quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, hit as tensions between the two sides over the Tigers´ demands for self-rule reached fever pitch.

The rebels threatened a month ago to break the truce, but have since appealed for government help to cope with the tsunami´s aftermath.

The giant waves also wrought devastation on fishing villages on the coast of the Jaffna peninsula.

"The sea has taken our lives," said Charles, a white-bearded man in a dirty white sarong who sat looking over the destruction.

Along a 6.4km stretch west from Point Pedro to the village of Valvedditturai -- once a smugglers paradise and fishing haven but now a ghost town -- barely a house was left standing.

Mangled cars and debris from buildings now litter the coast that was once lined with row after row of fishing boats.

But local fishermen had lost more than their livelihood.

"My wife and youngest child have gone, washed away with our house," said Peter Solomon, who survived with three other children.

- REUTERS


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Just one thing after another...damn shame :(

bump for Compassion...

Bump for CLASSIC DOOM.

you fuckers need jesus

it could happen again

Final death toll: 227,898 dead


In memorium.