Thai police opened a shipping container filled with documents and possessions of victims of the Indian Ocean Tsunami after being asked by Reuters for permission to film its contents. The three meter by 12 meter container was handed over to Thai police in and contains hundreds of plastic police evidence bags - each one holding the precious items found on the body of a victim. People light candles as survivors, local residents and visitors gather for a ceremony for victims of tsunami in Ban Nam Khem, a southern fishing village destroyed by the wave, on December 26, In Thailand, where 5, people were killed, among them about 2, foreign tourists, commemoration ceremonies will be held in Ban Nam Khem.
Hundreds of lanterns which symbolizes the spirits of victims of the Asian tsunami, are released into the sky during a commemoration service to mark the 10th anniversary of the day this natural disaster happened, on December 26, in Ban Nam Khem, Thailand.
Soe, the eight-year-old daughter of a fisherman from Myanmar, rests in a hammock outside her family home in Ban Nam Khem, Thailand, on December 13, Ban Nam Khem, a small fishing village on Thailand's Andaman Sea coast and home to a large migrant workers' community, lost nearly half of its population of 5, in the tsunami. We want to hear what you think about this article.
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The Atlantic Crossword. 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? 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? 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. 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.
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 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.
At AM, a 9. The Boxing Day tsunami would be the deadliest in recorded history, taking a staggering , lives in a matter of hours. Buildings folded like houses of cards, trees and cars were swept up in the oil-black rapids and virtually no one caught in the deluge survived. Thailand was next. With waves traveling mph across the Indian Ocean, the tsunami hit the coastal provinces of Phang Nga and Phuket an hour and a half later. Despite the time lapse, locals and tourists were caught completely unaware of the imminent destruction.
Curious beachgoers even wandered out among the oddly receding waves, only to be chased down by a churning wall of water. The death toll in Thailand was nearly 5, including 2, foreign tourists. An hour later, on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean, the waves struck the southeastern coast of India near the city of Chennai, pushing debris-choked water kilometers inland and killing more than 10, people, mostly women and children, since many of the men were out fishing.
But some of the worst devastation was reserved for the island nation of Sri Lanka, where more than 30, people were swept away by the waves and hundreds of thousands left homeless.
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