( o Y o )
26th December 2004, 11:15 PM
Thousands die in killer waves
THE death toll from an earthquake off Indonesia and the tsunamis that it unleashed neared 11,500 today, with officials reporting deaths in seven countries in southern and southeastern Asia.
The quake, the fifth largest ever recorded at 8.9 on the Richter scale, struck in the Indian Ocean off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, unleashing tsunamis that hit Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives, Myanmar and Malaysia.
The huge quake erupted a year to the day after a quake in the Iranian city of Bam killed over 30,000 people.
Terrifying walls of water up to 10 metres high were reported in many areas, roaring ashore with bewildering speed, sweeping people off beaches, flattening hotels and homes, uprooting trees and overturning cars.
This morning the death toll had reached 11,460.
In Indonesia at least 4185 people were killed as the country took the full force of a huge earthquake and tidal waves that swallowed entire coastal villages.
Sri Lanka was hard hit with 4300 people confirmed dead, the Government and Tamil Tiger rebels said.
At least 2606 people were killed in India, with the chief minister of Tamil Nadu announcing 1705 deaths in her state alone and at least 300 people killed on the country's Andaman islands, where 700 are missing.
In southern Thailand at least 310 people were killed, including foreign tourists at famous seaside resorts, and 5000 injured, officials said.
In Malaysia 42 people, including many elderly and children, were killed, officials said.
A British tourist and 32 other people died in the low-lying Maldives, officials and residents said.
In Bangladesh a father and child were killed after a tourist boat capsized in large waves, local officials said.
Overnight, tourists told how they saw children swept away to certain death by the killer waves, which turned a peaceful Christmas vacation into scenes of horror.
Frenchman Philippe Gilbert told television station LCI he lost his four-year-old granddaughter when a huge wave crashed into their vacation spot in southern Sri Lanka.
"I was completely picked up by an absolutely monstrous wave.... By pure luck I found myself stuck between two trees and was able to hold my breath long enough," he said from the resort of Tangalla.
"I lost my granddaughter in that."
A Portuguese holidaymaker, Irina Carvalho, told of a similar tragedy on Thailand's tourist haven of Phi Phi island where a wave hit, destroying structures along the coast and "throwing dozens of people into the sea".
She told the Lusa news agency her boat took on board two Greeks, and a Swedish man who was hurt when the wave broke over the restaurant where he was having breakfast with his wife, four-year-old daughter and son, aged seven.
"He said that he clung on to his daughter and his wife to their son, but when he recovered his senses he was out at sea and his daughter was gone," Ms Carvalho said.
Lusa added that an eight-month old Portuguese baby was swept out of her mother's arms on the Thai island resort of Phuket, according to a source close to the parents, who like Ms Carvalho, live in the former Portuguese enclave of Macau in China.
France's foreign ministry confirmed the death of Mr Gilbert's granddaughter and a French employee of the Club Med tourist organisation on Phuket.
"It was like the disaster film The Day After had become reality," a German tourist in Phuket, Chris Arend, told the n-24 television station.
"I saw cars hurled 300 or 400 metres, jet-skis fly 400 metres and land in bungalows. It was a catastrophe. Those who knew the place, I can tell them: it no longer exists.... We'll never forget this Christmas vacation."
Mark McBride, from Belfast, said he and his girlfriend were out on a boat off Phuket when the wave hit. They picked up stranded Swedish snorkellers.
"There was one girl badly injured. She was with a group of 15 of which we picked up four. She had lost her boyfriend. There are lots of people missing, lots of people injured, lots of chaos."
Other British tourists said the violence was frightening.
"Initially we just heard a bang, a really loud bang, and I thought it was the hotel itself," Gerrard Donnelly, also staying in Phuket, told Sky News television.
"We initially thought it was a terrorist attack, then the wave came and we just kept running upstairs to get on as high ground as we could."
A 29-year-old photographer from London, Simon Clark, spoke from the Thai island of Koh Ngai.
"People that were snorkelling were dragged along the coral and washed up on the beach, and people that were sunbathing got washed into the sea," he said.
A Polish tourist in Phuket, who survived when she and her boyfriend quickly ducked back to their hotel room just before the tsunami struck, told her mother, Anna Kobus, that people "who had gone to the beach are all dead", PAP news agency reported.
Briton Alison Winward, an editor for the weekly English-language paper Phuket Gazette, said that 66 people, including 20 foreign nationals, were reported dead on Phuket.
The island's governor Udomsak Aswarangkul said 214 people were missing including 162 foreign tourists. He gave a death toll of 117, but did not specify nationalities.
In the Netherlands, the national tourist assistance organisation ANWB said it was seeking news of seven Dutch citizens missing in Thailand and three in Sri Lanka.
ANWB said it had heard from about 50 Dutch travellers, in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Sumatra who had lost their belongings in the catasatrophe. Some were sheltering on the roofs of their hotels.
In the southern Sri Lankan resort of Unawatuna a BBC reporter, Roland Buerk, said: "We were swept along for a few hundred metres, trying to dodge the motorcycles and the refrigerators and the cars that were coming with us.
"This has caused incredible devastation here. There are cars in trees, buildings destroyed."
In the Maldives, Nicola Barton, a 33-year-old London resident on vacation, described similar destruction.
"It is just horrific. There are wooden sunbeds floating round the island, chairs from the restaurants and glass smashed everywhere, bulbs from the lighting.
"We have all got life jackets in case it happens again."
THE death toll from an earthquake off Indonesia and the tsunamis that it unleashed neared 11,500 today, with officials reporting deaths in seven countries in southern and southeastern Asia.
The quake, the fifth largest ever recorded at 8.9 on the Richter scale, struck in the Indian Ocean off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, unleashing tsunamis that hit Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives, Myanmar and Malaysia.
The huge quake erupted a year to the day after a quake in the Iranian city of Bam killed over 30,000 people.
Terrifying walls of water up to 10 metres high were reported in many areas, roaring ashore with bewildering speed, sweeping people off beaches, flattening hotels and homes, uprooting trees and overturning cars.
This morning the death toll had reached 11,460.
In Indonesia at least 4185 people were killed as the country took the full force of a huge earthquake and tidal waves that swallowed entire coastal villages.
Sri Lanka was hard hit with 4300 people confirmed dead, the Government and Tamil Tiger rebels said.
At least 2606 people were killed in India, with the chief minister of Tamil Nadu announcing 1705 deaths in her state alone and at least 300 people killed on the country's Andaman islands, where 700 are missing.
In southern Thailand at least 310 people were killed, including foreign tourists at famous seaside resorts, and 5000 injured, officials said.
In Malaysia 42 people, including many elderly and children, were killed, officials said.
A British tourist and 32 other people died in the low-lying Maldives, officials and residents said.
In Bangladesh a father and child were killed after a tourist boat capsized in large waves, local officials said.
Overnight, tourists told how they saw children swept away to certain death by the killer waves, which turned a peaceful Christmas vacation into scenes of horror.
Frenchman Philippe Gilbert told television station LCI he lost his four-year-old granddaughter when a huge wave crashed into their vacation spot in southern Sri Lanka.
"I was completely picked up by an absolutely monstrous wave.... By pure luck I found myself stuck between two trees and was able to hold my breath long enough," he said from the resort of Tangalla.
"I lost my granddaughter in that."
A Portuguese holidaymaker, Irina Carvalho, told of a similar tragedy on Thailand's tourist haven of Phi Phi island where a wave hit, destroying structures along the coast and "throwing dozens of people into the sea".
She told the Lusa news agency her boat took on board two Greeks, and a Swedish man who was hurt when the wave broke over the restaurant where he was having breakfast with his wife, four-year-old daughter and son, aged seven.
"He said that he clung on to his daughter and his wife to their son, but when he recovered his senses he was out at sea and his daughter was gone," Ms Carvalho said.
Lusa added that an eight-month old Portuguese baby was swept out of her mother's arms on the Thai island resort of Phuket, according to a source close to the parents, who like Ms Carvalho, live in the former Portuguese enclave of Macau in China.
France's foreign ministry confirmed the death of Mr Gilbert's granddaughter and a French employee of the Club Med tourist organisation on Phuket.
"It was like the disaster film The Day After had become reality," a German tourist in Phuket, Chris Arend, told the n-24 television station.
"I saw cars hurled 300 or 400 metres, jet-skis fly 400 metres and land in bungalows. It was a catastrophe. Those who knew the place, I can tell them: it no longer exists.... We'll never forget this Christmas vacation."
Mark McBride, from Belfast, said he and his girlfriend were out on a boat off Phuket when the wave hit. They picked up stranded Swedish snorkellers.
"There was one girl badly injured. She was with a group of 15 of which we picked up four. She had lost her boyfriend. There are lots of people missing, lots of people injured, lots of chaos."
Other British tourists said the violence was frightening.
"Initially we just heard a bang, a really loud bang, and I thought it was the hotel itself," Gerrard Donnelly, also staying in Phuket, told Sky News television.
"We initially thought it was a terrorist attack, then the wave came and we just kept running upstairs to get on as high ground as we could."
A 29-year-old photographer from London, Simon Clark, spoke from the Thai island of Koh Ngai.
"People that were snorkelling were dragged along the coral and washed up on the beach, and people that were sunbathing got washed into the sea," he said.
A Polish tourist in Phuket, who survived when she and her boyfriend quickly ducked back to their hotel room just before the tsunami struck, told her mother, Anna Kobus, that people "who had gone to the beach are all dead", PAP news agency reported.
Briton Alison Winward, an editor for the weekly English-language paper Phuket Gazette, said that 66 people, including 20 foreign nationals, were reported dead on Phuket.
The island's governor Udomsak Aswarangkul said 214 people were missing including 162 foreign tourists. He gave a death toll of 117, but did not specify nationalities.
In the Netherlands, the national tourist assistance organisation ANWB said it was seeking news of seven Dutch citizens missing in Thailand and three in Sri Lanka.
ANWB said it had heard from about 50 Dutch travellers, in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Sumatra who had lost their belongings in the catasatrophe. Some were sheltering on the roofs of their hotels.
In the southern Sri Lankan resort of Unawatuna a BBC reporter, Roland Buerk, said: "We were swept along for a few hundred metres, trying to dodge the motorcycles and the refrigerators and the cars that were coming with us.
"This has caused incredible devastation here. There are cars in trees, buildings destroyed."
In the Maldives, Nicola Barton, a 33-year-old London resident on vacation, described similar destruction.
"It is just horrific. There are wooden sunbeds floating round the island, chairs from the restaurants and glass smashed everywhere, bulbs from the lighting.
"We have all got life jackets in case it happens again."