Sea of Sorrow

By Michael Elliott

They are burning bodies on the shore of Tamil Nadu in southern India, and Manikimuttu, 24, whose grandfather is among the 60 or so in the pyre, is crazed with grief, one moment scooping water into cooking pots and throwing it on the flames, the next collapsing in uncontrollable sobs. They are collecting bodies from the normally green lawn in front of the old mosque in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, now littered with a thick debris of dead snakes, chickens and humans--at just one collection point in the city, authorities have gathered 3,500 corpses. On the Andaman coast in Thailand, soldiers are using an ax and a spade to dig out the body of a woman half-buried beneath a palm tree. Fifty miles south in Patong, a honky-tonk beach town on Phuket Island, 100 bodies are laid out in front of a morgue that has room to refrigerate only two. In Batticaloa, on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, dozens of men have lined up on either side of a bridge, watching for bodies trapped underwater to pop up to the surface of a lagoon. Six corpses are unloaded from a pickup truck. One of the Red Cross workers handling them complains that he has had enough; the bodies he has to handle are at this point so decomposed that their limbs have a tendency to come off. To the south, in Galle, Z.A.M. Fahim, 45, a restaurant owner, has found 32 bodies before midday. He walks toward what was once a busy junction in the town and claims that the giant swamp that now obscures the ground hides 500 more corpses. To prove his point, he walks over to a marshy landscape of tires, rafters and mud. "There," he says, pointing to yet another body, lying in the open. "We are standing on bodies right now."

The cause of the carnage was a massive earthquake that trembled the earth's crust off the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, setting off through the oceans shock waves that were felt more than 3,000 miles away on the coast of East Africa, where at least 200 people died. Bustami, a fisherman from the Sumatran village of Bosun, is one who experienced the quake and tsunami and lived to tell about them. Sometime after 7:30 on the morning of Dec. 26, he says, he was on his boat just off the coast when he felt the sea moving around him. "That must have been when the earthquake hit," he says. (The precise time of the shock was 7:58 a.m.) About half an hour later came the shock wave--the tsunami--that devastated the region. At first, Bustami saw water retreat from shore, with fish jumping around on the empty beaches. Then, he says, "I heard this strange thunderous sound from somewhere, a sound I'd never heard before. I thought it was the sound of bombs." The water rose behind him as high as the coconut trees on the shoreline, and he was thrown off his boat. "It felt like doomsday," says Bustami, who, after clinging to a coconut tree, was eventually picked up by a soldier three hours later, almost 2 miles away from where he had lost his boat.

The combined effects of the earthquake and tsunami that Bustami survived has killed tens of thousands. The precise number is so far unknown and ultimately unknowable. On Dec. 30, the Indonesian government doubled the number of likely dead in that country alone to 80,000, though that was no more than a guess. The area most affected by the quake and tsunami is Aceh, at Sumatra's northern tip--difficult to get to in the best of times and a place where a long and bloody insurgency has made travel and the provision of emergency services desperately hard. Whole fishing villages in Aceh have probably been wiped out, with nobody left to count the human cost. With estimated death counts of almost 9,000 in India, 29,000 in Sri Lanka, 5,000 in Thailand and smaller numbers in seven other countries, the immediate death toll attributable to the disaster was well over 123,000 by late Saturday. And stalking behind the water and toppled rubble that had drowned or crushed so many, death was ready to arrive in the form of disease. The waters washed over some of the poorest parts of the world, destroying primitive sewage systems, contaminating rudimentary water supplies, readying countless infants for death by diarrhea and providing luscious breeding grounds for the insects that transmit malaria and dengue.

Like no other natural disaster in living memory, the Asian tsunami induced a planetary torrent of sorrow, followed by a massive outpouring of money and supplies from public and private sources that at times overwhelmed the relief workers and government agencies trying to deliver water, food and medicine to those in greatest danger. The Bush Administration pledged an initial sum of $15 million and was promptly pilloried for offering aid inadequate to the scale of the disaster. (In the initial count, 15 Americans were reported dead.) Stung by criticism of the U.S.'s perceived parsimony, the Administration increased the contribution to $350 million. The Pentagon deployed the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and 11 other warships loaded with supplies, helicopters and soldiers to the coast of western Sumatra to help in the relief effort. Some 1,500 U.S. Marines headed for Sri Lanka. All told, governments around the world pledged more than $2 billion in the first week of the crisis, a figure that is sure to rise. The U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who earlier accused the world's richest nations of being "stingy," said he has "never, ever, seen such an outpouring of international assistance in any international disaster, ever."

It's worth noting that the Sumatran quake wasn't the deadliest temblor in modern times. In 1976 as many as 750,000 people died in a huge quake that leveled the northern Chinese town of Tangshan. But at that time China was a closed society, a place that did not willingly present the face of its tragedies to the outside world. Few places are like that today. What made last week's disaster so extraordinary was the way in which it was a truly global event. The tsunami placed a girdle of death around half the earth. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, tens of thousands of tourists fleeing the northern hemisphere's winter were enjoying Christmas vacations, some in swank hotels, many more in cheap rooms for rent along the beaches. According to the Swedish Foreign Ministry, 20,000 Swedes were celebrating Christmas in Thailand alone. Six days after the earthquake, 60 were reported dead, and more than 3,500 were still missing--and Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said there was an 80% chance that those missing were dead.

If mass tourism--one of the least celebrated but most profound of all the ways in which the world has been shrunk in the past 20 years--made the disaster uniquely personal to those who live thousands of miles away from its mayhem, so did modern technology. From broadband and wifi-enabled hotels, guests could email messages, pictures and videos back home. Mobile phones allowed people to stay in touch with their loved ones. And by some miracle of technology for which many were grateful, even when mobile circuits were overloaded, text messages got through. Sam Nicols, an engineer who researches nanotechnology at a Swedish university, was on a rock-climbing expedition in Tonsai, Thailand, when the tsunami hit, and he promptly used his Swedish cell phone to message his father John, a professor at the University of Oregon. "Just had a big tidal wave hit," read the first message. "I am not injured but lost some climbing gear, my camera and [my Thai] mobile phone. Please tell family am safe." Within hours of the quake, blogs with details of where to send aid had been launched, and terrifying pictures and videos of the tsunami were available at the click of a mouse.

The ubiquity of personal technology distorted the early news of the disaster. Because the first indications of its scale came from Sri Lanka and Thailand, it was easy to forget that the real devastation was not in well-heeled tourist enclaves but in dirt-poor Indonesian fishing villages. In any event, the earthquake reminded us--had we been foolish enough to forget it--that there are primal forces of nature that no amount of our wizard technology is able to confine. Yet technology can help. For decades, a sophisticated early-warning system has helped limit catastrophic damage from tsunamis in the Pacific. So, in the aftermath of the Sumatran earthquake, it was natural to ask whether anything could have been done to mitigate the disaster. And that is a question whose answer requires an understanding of what, precisely, happened on the morning of Dec. 26.

Geologists describe the tectonics--the almost imperceptibly slow movement of massive plates--of the southern Indian Ocean as complex because a number of plates converge there. The floor of the Indian Ocean--the Indian plate--is moving north at around 2.5 in. per year, about twice the rate that your fingernails grow. As it moves, it is forced under the Burma plate to its east. Eighteen miles below the surface of the ocean, stresses that had been gradually accumulating forced the Burma plate to snap upward. That was a huge geological event, eventually measured at 9.0 on the Richter scale. The dislocation of the boundary between the Indian and Burma plates took place over a length of 745 miles and within three days had set off 68 aftershocks.

The movement of the plates sent shock waves through the water. Although tsunamis are often (incorrectly) called tidal waves, they have nothing to do with tides. They are, rather, very long waves--sometimes with hundreds of miles between their crests--that race along the ocean at speeds that can reach almost 500 miles an hour. In deep, open water, you would never notice even the most devastating tsunamis, which are often no more than a few inches high there. But when the water's depth decreases, the wavelength shortens and the height of the wave increases. Then it crashes onto shore with the power to wreck buildings and throw trucks around as if they were Ping-Pong balls.

Tsunamis, moreover, have a trick up their watery sleeve, one that can trap the unwary. If the trough of a wave hits the shore before a crest, the first thing that anyone on shore notices is not water rushing onto the land but the opposite. That is what happened in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In the Sri Lankan town of Trincomalee, a hotel manager remembers the sea rushing out so the beach became magically full of gorgeous, colorful, stranded fish. "Men ran down to the shore with gunny-bags and stuffed them full of fish," he says. On Phuket, Tiina Seppanen, a Finn, 20, on vacation with her sister and mother, also noticed that the tide had gone way out. "People were saying it was something to do with the full moon," she says. And just as in Sri Lanka, people went on to the beach to collect the fish that had been stranded.

Those more experienced in the ways of the sea knew what was coming next. At the luxury Amanpuri Resort in Phuket, Richie Neustfisten was helping run the resort's water-skiing fleet when he noticed that the water had disappeared. He called his boss, Bill O'Leary, an Australian in charge of the Amanpuri boatyard, who was at sea with clients. O'Leary knew the signs. He told Neustfisten to get everyone off the beach and called friends at other hotels to tell them a tsunami was coming. The Amanpuri beach was cleared. About five minutes later, the waves started rolling in. Seppanen, a few miles away, saw the horizon rise and a wall of water approach, bringing with it small boats with anchors dangling. "At first I thought, It's O.K. Nothing bad is going to happen," she says. "A few seconds later the wave hit the road, and I thought, Now I die."

She didn't die. Seppanen was tumbled past shop fronts until two Ecuadoreans hauled her to safety into a hotel--but thousands of others did. Did so many need to? After all, the relationship between earthquakes and tsunamis is hardly an unknown science. And there were warnings that went unheeded. Fifteen minutes after the earthquake, Stuart Weinstein, the geophysicist on duty at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) in Honolulu dispatched a bulletin to countries around the Pacific Rim, including Indonesia and Thailand. After describing the size of the shock, Weinstein wrote: "Evaluation: This earthquake is located outside the Pacific. No destructive tsunami threat exists based on historical earthquake and tsunami data." Fifty minutes later, a further bulletin upgraded the quake to 8.5 and added the sentence "There is the possibility of a tsunami near the epicenter." Weinstein stresses that even for Pacific Ocean tsunamis, it's not the job of the PTWC to tell other nations what to do. "They're supposed to have their own tsunami experts," he says, "people who make the decisions based on the information we provide." Australian scientists work with the same protocols. "We knew half an hour after the earthquake happened that there was the potential for damage," says Phil McFadden, chief scientist at Geoscience Australia, a government agency. But when a quake involves other countries, the Australian authorities merely pass the word on to the government aid agency and diplomatic posts. "We can't tell another country what to do," says an Australian official.

The official in charge of Indonesia's new tsunami-warning system told TIME that his office received an email warning from the PTWC on the morning of Dec. 26 but failed to see the message until the following day. The official, who goes by the name Fauzi, was not at work on that fateful morning. Thai officials, meanwhile, knew that a big quake had occurred. For one thing, plenty of people in Bangkok felt it. At 8:15 a.m. on Dec. 26, says the duty officer at the Seismic Monitoring and Statistic Center in Bangkok, "The phone calls started pouring in." The officer, who doesn't want his name made public, and two colleagues struggled to answer the phones and assure callers that the quake was nowhere near Bangkok. He says he didn't have time to inform his boss before the wave hit, but he had no need to. Sumalee Prachuab, who supervises the Bangkok office, was having breakfast at a beach resort in Cha-Am in southeast Thailand when a local monitoring station told her about the quake. By 9 a.m., she knew that the shock had been off Sumatra, and the Bangkok office had started to fax details to local radio and TV stations. But the duty officer concedes that there was no sense of urgency. "The earthquake was far away," he says. "In the past 1,000 years we've never had a tsunami, so why should I issue a warning for one?" Sumalee repeats the thought. "I never considered issuing a tsunami warning because we never had a tsunami before," she says, bristling at press reports that she hesitated to sound an alarm because it would damage Thailand's tourism industry. "Concerns about scaring tourists away never came into it," Sumalee says.

Even if a warning had been sent out, it might not have done much good, at least in areas near the quake's epicenter. In Pacific nations like Japan, people know what to do when they hear a tsunami is coming. "It's very much a matter of having the education in place," McFadden says. "In many cases, you know what happens if you tell people there's going to be a tsunami? They go down to the beach to have a look." And given the size of the earthquake, it is hard to believe that any warning system would have saved many lives in Aceh, where the majority of the deaths occurred.

But India and Sri Lanka are a different story. It took nearly two hours for the tsunami to reach those countries, but in neither country did residents receive any warning of the likely disaster. "That morning, the sea was like it always is," says Baalaramanan, 23, a fisherman in the Indian town of Akkarapettai. "Then suddenly it was on fire. Boiling. It lifted up 11 yards and paused, almost like it was surveying us below it. And then it fell. It consumed one house after another, like paper boxes." A day later, rescuers found the bodies of 300 fish sellers and buyers from a local market, their bodies swept 2 miles inland, while all around lay an estimated 5,500 more.

It's impossible to know how many lives might have been saved if a tsunami-warning system had existed in the countries ringing the Indian Ocean. In the wake of the catastrophe, the U.N. announced that by next year it plans to link countries in South and Southeast Asia with the Pacific Ocean network that alerts countries like Japan, Australia and the U.S. when tsunamis pose risks to their territories.

For many, of course, it will have come too late. In Sri Lanka, village after village was pounded, but in a ravaged land, one place stands out. In Kahawa, on the south coast, the cars of a train lie separated and sprawled on the ground, relief workers and Buddhist monks in saffron robes crawling over them. This is where at least 1,000 people died. Karl Max Hantke, a German with a holiday home overlooking the train station, says that shortly after the first wave hit, he saw a packed train come to a halt, perhaps because its engineer thought stopping was safer than moving on. When the first wave retreated into the ocean, he says, local people ran to the train and left their children there. Then a second and a third wave smashed into the train, knocking its cars into nearby houses and trees. Rescue workers think that few of the 1,500 people on the train made it out alive. Among the dead were five children of a local friend of Hantke's, placed by their father in the train in the belief that it was safe.

If stories like that broke the world's collective heart, so did the scraps of paper pinned up along the broken coastlines. There were photographs of the dead in India. Thailand had messages like "Try and contact us, Mum and Dad. Love, Louis and Theo" and a leaflet offering $10,000 for any information about a Swedish family--a mother, father and four children. As the full horror of the death toll in Aceh became apparent at the end of the week, it was clear that in countries other than Indonesia, the count could still rise. Five days after the tsunami, there were fears that hundreds or possibly thousands of corpses might still be undiscovered in Khao Lak, a Thai resort area that was devastated. Even the few heartwarming tales of survival--of children reunited with their parents after days spent apart--were overlaid with grief. Marko Karkkainen, a Swedish man hospitalized by injuries, discovered that his toddler son Hannes Bergstroem had survived the catastrophe. After a Thai villager had rescued the boy from the raging surf, an American couple found him wrapped in blankets on a hill. But the boy's mother remained among the missing. While there were plenty of stories of heroism and sacrifice, there were less comforting tales too. Within a few hours of the tsunami's hitting Thailand, there was widespread looting of wrecked hotels. In five-star hotels on the Indian coast, tourists were locked in rooms as panicked crowds surged through the streets and looters picked jewelry from the bodies in the rubble.

As if to mirror some of the more sordid elements of the tragedy's aftermath, the world outside indulged in an unseemly scrap about who was giving the most aid. After U.N. relief coordinator Egeland lambasted rich countries for skimping on their assistance to the region, the White House lashed back. "I felt like the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed," said President George W. Bush, speaking from his home in Crawford, Texas, three days after the earthquake. Why the delay? Because, White House aides say, the President does not like to "showboat" by speaking too soon after events like this. "He didn't want to go out there and just speak for speaking's sake," says an aide. Democrats made hay of Bush's delayed response and ridiculed the Administration's initial pledge, suggesting that some of the $18 billion earmarked for Iraq reconstruction be diverted to help tsunami victims. The White House said it was waiting for assessments of the damage, and Bush pointed out that the U.S. provided 40% of the world's total disaster-relief funds last year, but even Republicans sighed at the Bush team's contortions. "The attitude problem is huge," says a Bush adviser. "We will probably give a lot of money and get no credit." The U.S.'s increased contribution of $350 million still wasn't enough to make it the world's most generous donor. Japan earned that designation by pledging $500 million.

For those who were anywhere near the areas wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami, politics was the last thing on their mind. What was left was a humbling understanding of the awesome power of nature as the aching individual human tragedy played itself out. A Swedish man begged a Phuket hotel to let him store the coffins of his two dead children in its kitchen refrigerator. In a Buddhist temple in Bang Muang, Thailand, 180 corpses lay beneath a shelter, with an additional 80 in coffins, rigor mortis making their arms stretch out beseechingly. Fifteen hundred miles away, they were setting the fires again in Tamil Nadu. Fueled by diesel oil, the flames were accompanied by the sound of popping skulls and stomachs. Subash, 25, watched. He, his brother and his mother, he said, were the only ones of a household of 14 to survive, climbing onto a roof terrace and forced to listen as their relatives screamed for help and drowned inside their house. "We buried and burned 300 yesterday," he said, "and 500 today." The family members who survived plan to leave the coast forever. "Since my childhood, I've known nothing more closely than the sea," Subash says. "Now I hate it." --With reporting by Aravind Adiga/Kahawa; John Dickerson/ Washington; Ilya Garger, Neil Gough and Hanna Kite/ Hong Kong; Robert Horn/ Bangkok; Zamira Loebis/ Banda Aceh; Andrew Marshall/Khao Lak; Alex Perry/ Tamil Nadu; Ulla Plon/ Copenhagen; Sonja Steptoe/ Los Angeles; Aatish Taseer/ London; and Jason Tedjasukmana/ Jakarta

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With reporting by Aravind Adiga/Kahawa; John Dickerson/ Washington; Ilya Garger; Neil Gough; Hanna Kite/ Hong Kong; Robert Horn/ Bangkok; Zamira Loebis/ Banda Aceh; Andrew Marshall/Khao Lak; Alex Perry/ Tamil Nadu; Ulla Plon/ Copenhagen; Sonja Steptoe/ Los Angeles; Aatish