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| Sunday, 2 January 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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A tsunami experience by Ranga Jayasuriya Tsunami hit the people who were unaware of the impending danger. It was only after the waves swallowed up people, battered through their houses and shops that people realised the force of waves were far beyond the normal sea waves and that the force was such that they could not swim across the wave.
Tsunami devastated the southern coastal belt, where Kathaluwa my remote village lies. It was Sunday morning, the usual time for most people to shop at Sunday Pola in Ahangama. As the news of the unfolded tragedy spread people were fleeing from their houses in panic. This was a shock, but more shocks were to unfold on the coastal highway as I cycled to Ahangama, in search of my father who went to the pola. The rubble of battered houses, seaside tourist lodges were on the road which was still a few feet under water. Once trendy hotels were virtually in ruins, with something like shelled out walls barely holding the roof. The lesser privileged ordinary shops and houses had been turned to rubble. Huge fishing boats were tossed to the road and land about hundred meters away from the harbour. The scale of the tragedy began to surface as people recovered bodies strewn on the land and buried in debris of the devastated buildings. A youth was weeping as people carried the body of a lady, seemed to be his mother, taken out from the debris. A dozen corpses were strewn around the road at a place only a few meters to the sea. They were unlucky to be at the wrong place at the time of the tragedy. People already hit with the worst ever natural disaster felt further helpless when they realised that the roads were all blocked with rubble of destroyed buildings, which means no passable roads to transport injured and dead to hospitals. Passengers in buses who were on the coastal highway were the most exposed to the ravaging sea waves. Most of the drivers could not notice the coming waves and even those who noticed were not confident of the power of their vehicles. Sea tides tossed buses like paper boxes. After the tide resided, people retrieved corpses from buses where they were tossed over a hundred meters away from the road. Corpses were placed beside the road, untill the rescue workers find vehicles to take them to hospitals. The railway line, which is over two hundred meters from the coast was washed away. Those who noticed the unusual behaviour of the sea were fortunate to live, even though the sea destroyed their lifetime earnings. A youth successfully evacuated their entire family, including his centurion grandmother, simply because he noticed a huge wave on the deep sea and had enough time to alert the entire family and neighbours. But some were not so fortunate. The sea swallowed entire families and their property. And their bodies were not returned, like what happened to an elderly teacher and her sister living in Goyyapana or to my relatives in Hikkaduwa, Peraliya whose all, but one member of the family were washed away to the sea. Such stories are only a piece of the colossal loss of the human lives; a few melodramas of a long list of over 20,000. Scale of the catastrophe began to unfold at the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital, its mortuary was overflowing with arriving corpses, while most relatives could not reach the hospital to identify bodies due to unpassable roads. On the second day after the tragedy, hospital authorities buried 400 bodies to make room in the mortuary for arriving corpses. By Wednesday, there were over thousand and two hundred corpses lying, stacked one on the other. Like rest of the affected areas, my village ran out of coffins. The village carpenter came to help making humble makeshift coffins. The funerals were a humble affair with only a few in attendance. The body of a young girl was brought in by a trailer and we buried her within hours, in the same morning. Mother of one of our friends was buried even before her son arrived from Embilipitiya. Only the individual miracles saved people, like in the case of my father who climbed to a tree when the waves hit the Ahangama town and helplessly saw people swallowed up by the soaring water. Or like my cousin sister who was rescued by an unknown man when being washed away by the sea water and admitted to hospital, where her devastated parents searching for her visited as the last resort with little hope. Another miracle when a lonely fisherman who was rescued by an Air Force helicopter three days after the incident. But such tales of survival are rare and those of death are soaring large in numbers. Horror and trauma are swelling as more bodies washed to the coast and retrieved on land. In the absence of public transport, I jumped into a relief vehicle to come to Colombo from my devastated home town. People were surrounding the vehicle at every stop it made to distribute clothes. And their pathetic situation is heart rendering. Their lifetime earnings and loved ones have been swallowed up by the sea and they have been left to live with an eternal trauma. Travelling through the wreckages on both sides of the coastal highway, I wondered how long it would take people to get over their personal trauma before they begin to rebuild the area. |
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