Posted on 12/29/2004 8:51:29 PM PST by Forgiven_Sinner
HONG KONG (AFP) - When the catastrophic earthquake struck, British tourist Al Howard and his French girlfriend Sophie Pasquier were among the closest people on the planet to its tumultuous epicentre.
Two days later -- after an epic journey across seas littered with floating corpses and mangled cars, then crawling over a wasteland of flattened houses and bloodied bodies -- the tourists remarkably emerged alive to tell the tale.
The couple's story of survival, recounted to AFP after they successfully fled Indonesia Tuesday, is one of the first to emerge from witnesses closest to the centre of the disaster which left more than 55,000 dead across Asia.
Howard, a 33-year-old former soldier, and Pasquier, 34, were on a diving trip on Indonesia's most northwestern island of Pulau Weh, just 130 kilometres (85 miles) from Sunday's seabed eruption, when the earth shook.
The couple, who live in Hong Kong, were woken at 8am Sunday when their holiday bungalow shook for 30 minutes, Howard said. Within minutes giant waves roared in and reduced the holiday idyll to ruins, with water rising almost as high as their hut, which fortunately was 50 feet (15 metres) up in the highlands behind on Gapang Beach.
From their balcony they watched as the waters receded to leave a scene of devastation, with huts destroyed and debris flung far and wide. Yet so remote is the island that the couple had no idea of the scale of unfolding disaster they had been among the first to witness.
"We were totally cut off," said Howard, a sales director with European aviation giant Airbus. "We had no idea anyone else was affected because communications were wiped out."
It was only after they hired a fishing boat to ferry them to mainland Sumatra that the carnage wrought by Asia's biggest earthquake in 40 years became terrifyingly real.
Arriving in what had been Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province, they were confronted with visions of hell.
"Everything was flattened. It was like a nuclear bomb had hit the place," said Howard, a former officer with the 6th Gurkha Rifles. "I've seen bodies before but nothing by like this. We lost count. The destruction was of Biblical proportions."
Pasquier, 34, said she felt lucky to be alive.
"It was indescribable. I'm just glad we made it out. I feel so lucky," said the public relations executive after they arrived back in Singapore
Banda Aceh had taken the full force of the ocean's fury Sunday, accounting for an estimated 27,000 victims of the quake and tsunami disaster that killed indiscriminately and swallowed entire towns around south and southeast Asian coastlines.
The night before the quake struck the couple had been celebrating Christmas with two friends, Briton Sean Patterson -- an ex-Gurkha comrade of Howard's and also a former peace negotiator between Indonesian authorities and separatists in conflict-scarred Aceh -- and his Japanese girlfriend Akiko Tada.
They dined with 25 others, mostly Western tourists, at the Lumba Lumba Dive Centre, a resort set up nine years ago on Palau Weh by Dutch couple Ton and Marjan Edberg. The centre had only this year reopened to tourists after martial law was lifted in troubled Aceh.
"When the bungalow shook I thought it might be a volcanic eruption, that it was Krakatoa erupting, but then I realised it was an earthquake," Howard said.
Had they not been sleeping off the effects of the previous night's party they would have been on the beach with other tourists when the raging waters rushed in, he said.
Instead Pasquier was stood outside the bungalow and shouted "come out now!" as the tsunami roared inland at terrifying speed.
"I got up and water was suddenly 10 feet away from the hut having surged right through the dive centre," said Howard. "We had no idea what was happening. We couldn't get to the beach because of the water. We were 50ft above sea level and it came with 10 feet.
"The water receded after a few minutes, but then a new wave rushed back up again almost to where we were standing."
When the waves finally retreated to the shoreline Howard and Pasquier walked down to the resort. "Nothing was left. Huts had been destroyed. Concrete benches uprooted and hurled 30 metres. The dive centre's engine room wall was made of thick concrete and it looked like it had been punched through," Howard said.
Several aftershocks rocked the island Sunday as the four friends joined other tourists gathering up wreckage strewn along the beach and patching up the wounded.
"There were rumours people had been swept away, but we didn't know. There were no bodies on the beach. Some people had been lacerated by the debris and everyone brought medical supplies to bandage them," Howard said.
"Local children were left with just the clothes on their back and the beach toys tourists had given them for Christmas.
"We started taking photographs because we thought no-one, especially insurance companies, would ever believe what had happened when we got back home."
The next day the Howard and this three friends decided to leave the stricken village.
They drove over the island to the more protected eastern shore but found Bulohan village had also been demolished. Driving on to Sabang village they managed to hire a fishing boat to take them to Banda Aceh on the mainland.
Halfway through the three-and-a-half hour voyage, the group sailed into so much detritus which clogged the propeller that they feared they would not make it to land.
Then the horror began to strike them.
"As we got within a mile (1.6 kilometres) of the coast we saw bodies, cars, even snakes floating in the water ... there was debris everywhere," said Howard.
When they reached Banda Aceh the ferry pier had been destroyed, so they pulled up next to another fishing boat and clambered ashore to a scene of utter carnage.
"Oh My God - a child," Pasquier gasped as they walked past the first of hundreds of dead bodies they would have to clamber past and over as they made their way through the ruins of the city.
"From then on we walked for two to three hours in total silence," Howard said. "There was no road left. We had to pick our own way through the destruction, right past the dead.
"Walking through the carnage was awful. At some points we had to crawl through the rubble with smashed faces of the dead inches from our own.
"The city was levelled with just a few damaged buildings still standing. There was oil over the road where petrol stations had been shattered. Everything was covered in oil."
"I saw child on a bonnet of a car. A mother with three children laid together. Some corpses had tarpaulin over them, others didn't. There were so many bodies I gave up counting.
"There was nothing we could do ... no-one alive to help."
After a gruelling six kilometre stumble through the twisted wreckage, the four tourists eventually found a road. A makeshift morgue nearby was stacked with hundreds of bodies, Howard said.
"People were standing around shocked, holding their heads in despair. What could they do? They had lost their lives."
Howard said not everyone appeared to be weighing in on the rescue effort.
"There were Indonesian soldiers in armoured cars and police sitting on corners, smoking and watching everything. They were doing nothing to help people," said Howard.
After almost three hours waiting at the roadside, the four hitched a ride on a truck to Banda Aceh airport 40 minutes away.
Howard said that their luck was in - a Garuda airlines plane was on the runway. Even though the airport was partly flooded the exhausted survivors managed to get on board and an hour later the plane took off for north Sumatra's main international airport of Medan.
In Medan their mobile phones began to pick up signals and they were able to call worried friends and relatives.
It was then they realised that they had not just been at the centre of a local disaster but at the epicentre one of the world's biggest ever earthquakes.
"We are worried about the people we left behind," said Howard. "Everything has been destroyed. While there is still food available on Palau Weh, there maybe a shortage of bottled water. And who knows when they will get help or new supplies."
Ah, Phuket. We're stingy, after all.
Cool animation, but not satellite imagery, I don't think...
So much for that disaster movie that had a cool CGI of a 500 foot high Tidal Wave.
"There were Indonesian soldiers in armoured cars and police sitting on corners, smoking and watching everything. They were doing nothing to help people," said Howard.
Probably muslims. Care about nothing but themselves.
Thanks. Of all the photos I've seen, those two are the most telling.
Horrific doesn't begin to describe it.
That second picture, of the tidal wave about to engulf the fleeing people, is fraudulent. It is from an earlier, much less serious event some years back.
This pic made the rounds of newsroom picture-servers worldwide two days ago, and has been debunked.
Will check it out for myself now. Thanks for the info.
It's sure easy to think it's from the tsunami... our paper was fooled as well, and we almost ran the shot until word was given that it's not right.
Could've fooled me, but that's what was said..
I remember those pictures and seeing the actual film footage a couple of years ago. If I'm not mistaken, it was from a smaller Pacific tsunami in Japan or the eastern side of Thailand, maybe? The building in the background might give somebody a better clue, but the location escapes me right now.
Are those PEOPLE in that top foto????
Yes.
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