Dear All
For those who might like to hear, following is a description of what happened to myself and my friends in Hikkaduwa,SW Sri Lanka on boxing day.
I didn't sleep much on Christmas night; it was hot, my mosquito net wasn't working, and I'd spent too much of christmas day sleeping off the party from the evening before. I got up about 7a.m on boxing day, sat on the beach, had a coffee in one of the terrace cafes that line the beach front, and stopped in at an internet cafe to send a few messages. It was a beautiful, calm morning; no hint of what was to come. I decided to rent a surf board and was just stopping back at my room to put my board shorts on, when the action started.
I'd been lucky to find, when we arrived on christmas eve, one of the desirable beachfront bedrooms in one of the decent guesthouses that are frequented by the surfers and independent travelers. I had only to step outside my room and I was in the guesthouse garden, 10m from the beach.
Fortunately, the room faced sideways, rather than directly, to the sea; and the guesthouse was of a solid, concrete construction. It was also on a slight bluff; maybe a couple of meters above the normal high tide level. These were all important factors.
The first I heard were some laughs and shouts from outside my room. As I stepped outside to see what was happening, water was already coming around my ankles and into my room. I saw that the sea level was up to the garden; a bizarre, confusing sight. I went back in the room and put my valuables on the bed. The water level was rising fast as I re-emerged, and the first of some smallish waves came through the garden. The water had risen rapidly up to about knee level. I ran to the next door room where my friends, Daryl and Angela, were staying and shouted for them just as Daryl opened the window adjacent to his door; I saw inside that Angela was running around trying to save things from the rising water, and as I looked back toward the sea I saw the first of the bigger waves coming through the front of the garden. Angela and Daryl still can't help but laugh when they describe the expression on my face at that point. I think I said something along the lines of 'What the ****...' and jumped up onto the window ledge as the wave hit me. Fortunately the window opened to the sea side so that, despite partially crushing me, it diverted alot of the waves energy away from and passed me. Daryl was trying to hang on to me as the second and third waves came in. Their room was filling rapidly with water and their furniture was swirling dangerously around them. We had to escape; there was a staircase some 25m down the building and Daryl and Angela struggled out of the room between waves and we waded down the garden.
As more waves approached we took shelter behind a concrete pillar that protected us from the worst of the debris that was crashing passed. Daryl made a quick run back to his room to close the door (realising that they'd lose everything if they left it open) while Angela clung to me. Bless her, she was terrified and in tears like any sensible person would be, while Daryl and I were still finding it all quite exciting. Just another example of how stupid men are. When Daryl rejoined us we made a final dash, between waves, to the staircase and up to safety on the first floor from where we watched proceedings until a few minutes later when the water started to recede. Miraculously we suffered no more than a few cuts and bruises from the general flotsam.
We had been fortunate in many ways; primarily, the slight elevation of the situation meant that we were hit by waves of probably only 4 to 5ft in height; pretty scary, but small enough for an adult to resist. We later came to see that the effect on low lying locations was far more devastating. One meter lower and the water would have been above our heads and lethal. Secondly, our rooms didn't face the ocean, so the main energy was diverted past them rather than straight into them; and lastly, we were staying in a building constructed primarily on solid concrete pillars that, again, allowed the waves to flow past. We could easily have been hit by debris or cut by the masses of broken glass swirling around us, and masonry could also have collapsed on us, as happened to so many people sheltering behind garden walls and the like.
The scene after the water receded was extraordinary; everything at ground level was smashed, uprooted, covered in mud, littered in debris. Goldfish from a large smashed display tank were flapping around all over the ground. We went back to our flooded rooms. Getting the doors open was difficult enough in itself, and it took several minutes for a couple of feet of water to drain out. The interiors were completely wrecked, and it took a while to sort through the wreckage to find my passport, wallet and other essentials. I recovered a favourite hawaiian shirt hanging in a tree on the far side of the garden.
We went out onto the beach to see if there were injured people, but none were evident; we were, however, greeted with the spectacle of the sea receded an extraordinary distance. In some places there was as much as a half kilometer of ocean bed exposed, I would estimate. The whole beach front was wrecked; all the cafes and bars gone. Furniture littering the sand. Palm trees lying around. Like the images we are familiar with of Florida after a hurricane. We went out into the street behind the beachfront buildings and saw similar damage. Everyone was just walking around looking dazed, strangely calm and silent. I bought a pair of flip-flops (my other shoes were gone) from a vendor who was just stood staring at the remains of her little business.
We met our other friends who were on the first floor of a neighbouring guest house, but hardly had time to enquire after their health before a shout went up in the street. A crowd of people were running, and initially I thought it was an angry mob; maybe looters; but then I heard what they were shouting. 'It's coming back!'. We ran back to the guest house, grabbed our things (I even had time to salvage the hawaiian shirt that I'd hung on a washing line!) as the water reentered the garden; the waves started crashing in again as we scrambled back onto the first floor. People warned us to get onto the roof, and from there we watched the second, more powerful, flood come through the garden and onto the street behind. Even greater damage was done by this one; maybe structures had been weakened by the first flow and ebb. Probably around 30 or 40 minutes separated the two floods.
When we eventually reemerged people were shouting to retreat inland to higher ground, but we were intially reluctant to go. It didn't seem probable that a larger flood would come; and the solid buildings with first floors seemed easily able to resist the deluge. We decided to take refuge in our friends hotel and spent several hours watching the water come and go from their first floor terrace. It never reached the height of the first two floods, but still came up above and down below normal high and low tide levels, in intervals of about thirty minutes for the whole of the rest of the day. It was a surreal sight; the usual laws of nature perverted.
I still feel guilty about this period we spent upstairs. We even opened some beers and, sort of, enjoyed the spectacle. I don't know why I was so immobilised by what had happened; there was so much I could have been doing, and yet the full import of the disaster had not sunk in.
There were no bodies to be seen floating around, and no people screaming for help. We later discovered that the locality within our sight was relatively lightly affected, but just a mile down the road it was whole different story. If only I'd known that just two miles away there was a derailed train filled with over a thousand trapped people, I might have been able to help save some lives. It was also ironic that one of my few losses was my camera; a photographer in the middle of a disaster zone, and probably the most significant moment of his life, unable to record it.
And so it will take a lot of words instead to describe what we saw.
I'll send this description of the actual event now, and maybe in the next day or two send a description of the aftermath and the two days we spent in Hikkaduwa amongst the carnage.
IMPORTANT!
In the meantime, can I please continue to encourage everyone to donate as much as possible; even if you gave yesterday, please give again today. And bear in mind that cash donations are much more effective that clothes, food, etc, that tend to create logistical headaches for the people who have to sort through them and distribute. Bear in mind, for instance, that if you give textiles to a country like , you are also damaging the local economy which relies on textile manufacture and has more than enough product stockpiled internally for donation or purchase by aid agencies. Ignore the signs outside supermarkets encouraging you to buy their over-packaged products that are completely space inefficient. If you do, or have, bought from them, then ask how much of the profit from your purchase will be donated in aid. Aid agencies can spend your money far more efficiently, and often within the affected economies themselves.
Best wishes for 2005. If you're having a party tonight, maybe use the opportunity to raise a little more cash. Or preferably a lot more cash.
Richard
