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Tsunami: So close, yet so far away

The city of Cuddalore, located south of Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, saw enormous destruction from the tsunami. It had at least 600 deaths of the approximately 15,000 in India. — AP photo

By David Bulla
Assistant Professor of Journalism

Jan. 26, 2005

The overhead fan in the suburban Mumbai apartment bedroom where my wife and I were sleeping suddenly stopped whirling on Jan. 2 at 9:30 a.m.

I looked at my wife, Kalpana Ramgopal, and said: “Oh, no, here we go again.”

A week before, at almost the exact same time, we had been awakened when the fan in her paternal grandparents’ apartment in Chennai had stopped. In that case, we would find out a nuclear power plant near Chennai had been shut down because of the tsunami that had struck the coast only a few minutes before.

We were ignorant of the tidal waves at the time they struck. We had only been asleep for a few hours, having flown into Chennai early that morning from Kalpana’s parents’ home in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

We both zonked out at 4:30 a.m. almost as soon as we reached her grandparents’ apartment in Besant Nagar, a community on the beach in the southeast part of Chennai. Their apartment is less than a mile from the beach.

Normally a light sleeper, I was in deep sleep that morning when the events unfolded.

An earthquake some 1,200 miles away had rumbled at 6:30 a.m. Indian time. Three hours later, the tidal waves reached the shores of southeast India. Chennai would have less than 200 deaths, a meager total on that day of excessive carnage.

When I awoke on Dec. 26, I went into the living room of the third-floor apartment to say good morning to Kalpana’s relatives, read The Hindu, the city’s largest English-language newspaper and have black tea.

Malthi, Kalpana’s aunt from Newcastle, England, was telling everybody about how she had been unable to pay for purchased goods from the market across the street because the electricity had gone off and the cash register would not work. She also said that the roads to the beach were closed to traffic because of several giant waves – news she had learned from her sister, who lives two blocks closer to the ocean.

Amma, Kalpana’s paternal grandmother, heard about the wave from her maid, whose family had been displaced by the tsunami. The maid worried another tsunami might hit and described the water at the beach as bubbling and gushing into their homes.

Once I realized what had happened, I went back into the bedroom to wake Kalpana and tell her the news.

A much heavier sleeper than I am, Kalpana woke with a start, and I told her about the quake and waves.

By now the entire family began to watch the news on television. The BBC and New Delhi Television (NDTV) were reporting serious damage in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, the Maldives and the Andoman and Nicobar Islands, where India has an air force base.

There was no visual proof yet, but word had come that entire towns had disappeared into the Indian Ocean.

The BBC anchor was occasionally reading e-mails from people who had witnessed the dramatic destruction. The anchor continually cautioned that the e-mail reports could not be confirmed. As a professional journalist, he had to err on the side of caution, but the e-mail reports would prove hauntingly accurate.

Two hours after the waves reached Chennai, Kalpana and I walked down the closed beach road toward the beach.

In India, most people do not use the beach to sit in the sun and swim. Rather, they take leisurely walks on the beach, hawkers sell their goods and children play cricket – and many poor people live in thatched huts there.

On this Boxing Day morning, there were only a handful of people on the wide beach in southeast Chennai.

Instead, most people were standing along the beachfront road looking out toward the shore.

The police had closed the beach to traffic. We saw few signs of the tsunami, except for some standing water several hundred yards from the shoreline near the road.

The seismic waves, as the Indian press called the tidal waves, had done far less destruction in this part of Chennai, except to displace poor people who lived along the beach.

They were out of their homes and living on mats and blankets on the roads that run perpendicular and parallel to the main beach road.

We would not really start to learn the severity of the tsunami until we got back to the apartment.

The television reporters spoke about the number of missing in cities and towns to the south of Chennai, most of them fishing villages, and those BBC e-mailers wrote about waves inundating towns in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand.

Still, we did not yet know just how awful the day had been elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and life pretty much went on as before in Besant Nagar.

The streets were a little less crowded and noisy, but it was a typical Sunday afternoon in this suburban Chennai neighborhood.

Indeed, it was a remarkably beautiful day. The humidity was low, the air quality better than we remembered it being two years previously, with the temperatures in the low 80s.

After lunch, Kalpana and I joined several other family members for a classical dance performance.

Afterwards, as we were driving through the city, we crossed the bridge over the Adyar River. People were lined up on each side of the bridge gazing at the water, which was much higher than it had been two years ago.

Later, we would eat dinner with Malthi’s extended family at the house near the beach, although all of us could not help watching television for the minute-by-minute coverage of the tsunami. Women and children were the majority of the dead, and video of the dead was starting to be aired.

Every hour we watched, the death toll grew.

Fishermen in India and Sri Lanka told the TV reporters they worried about more tsunamis. Folks who had almost nothing to begin with, but who collected what little they have in the world from the sea, now wanted no part of the ocean. They thought they were being punished by nature.

The photographs of the dead in The Hindu on that first Monday morning were shocking. In one photo, dozens of bodies were arranged in a pit, doused with kerosene. It looked like something from Auschwitz or Cambodia.

Another photo showed the bodies of children and women lined up on a floor. Most looked like they had been asleep when the wave struck.

Nobody suspected a thing. There had not been a tsunami in this part of the world since 1941. Before that, the last tsunami had been in 1881. So many people were dead that the media of India did not seem to have time to consider the ethics of running such graphic photographs. The carnage was real, and it was omnipresent.

The most haunting photo that appeared in The Hindu that first Monday was of a mother holding the lifeless body of her daughter in her arms.

The crying mother is gazing into the eyes of the girl, whose eyes are open just enough to make it appear that she is looking at her mother.

We would learn more from Amma’s maid. In Besant Nagar, the displaced families had been moved to a school, but they were not allowed to stay inside the school’s grounds.

Instead, they slept in the parking lot. Kalpana speculated that government officials feared the poor would overwhelm the school, especially the bathrooms.

Thus, these displaced families were getting colds because they were sleeping in a bus shed, on concrete floors on sheets or on mats.

The nights were a bit cool for this tropical land, and the morning dew was intense. The maid also reported her family and the other displaced families were receiving food from the government.

A few days later, the displaced in Besant Nagar would stage a mass protest against the government for not coming to their aid in an expeditious manner. That day, they sat down in the middle of a busy road that led to the beach in Besant Nagar.

As the first few days passed, a new fear arose – that the death toll from illness, especially malaria, cholera and dengue fever, would be higher than the wave toll.

And there were new fears.

On Thursday, the government again ordered the people off the beaches of southeast India. A fairly intense tremor off the coast of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands had caused the government to take preventative measures this time. It proved a false alarm, but nerves were frayed.

I was feeling edgy too. It felt wrong to be on vacation and to be unable to help those people whose lives had been transformed by the disaster.

To hide my feeling we were not doing as much as the occasion seemed to require, I focused on the media coverage of the event. As a media scholar, I ought to be taking in this historic coverage.

NDTV did a commendable job of dispatching reporters on the scene quickly, and the network’s reporting led the way the first few days.

Meanwhile, the indigenous language networks used an open-line approach. Information was conveyed by ordinary people, usually over the telephone.

The BBC performed on a high level, realizing the enormity of the disaster almost immediately.

Yet it was odd that as close as we were too the action, almost all of our knowledge of the catastrophe was mediated.

Yes, we did observe some of the aftermath, but most of that paled in comparison to the newspaper photography and television reports coming from southern Tamil Nadu, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, as well as the first-hand words from Amma’s maid.

Seetha, a friend, had been nearly mobbed the night before when she delivered dozens of packages of food to the displaced. A group of drunken men surrounded her car and demanded money instead of the food.

"They said they would spend it on coffee or tea because they were cold, but it’s more likely they would spend it on alcohol or drugs,” Seetha said.

She was only able to distribute about 300 of 500 packets of food. The men claimed they were getting food from the government and didn’t need anymore.

Later, we visited Marina Beach, the largest beach area in Chennai. We were overwhelmed by what we saw.

Boats and debris were everywhere, and the police still had the beach closed for fear of more bodies washing up or another tsunami since the Indian-Burmese fault zone near Sumatra was still active with tremors.

We were amazed to see that the water had actually crossed the main road – four lanes wide – and pushed one block inland, and this was a place that had come out relatively unscathed in the disaster.

A girl plays in a government orphanage in Nagapattinam after the tsunami disaster. She was one of 99 children who had a temporary home in the orphanage. — AP photo

By Wednesday night I was worn out. I had been sick for two days with a cold and diarrhea from anti-malaria medicine, but what did I have to whine about?

Look how lucky we were to have been inland a quarter of a mile on Sunday.

That night, Kalpana decided to procure vitamins for the survivors.

Amma had learned that a local group was gathering supplies to take to Nagapattinam on Thursday. The word came down that what was needed were rice, blankets, mats and vitamins, so we walked to the pharmacy across the street and purchased a box full of multivitamins.Then came Thursday, our last full day in Chennai.

It would be difficult leaving southeast India having done so little when so many needed so much. Yet it would have been impossible to get to Pondicherry, Nagapattinam or Cuddalore, the cities most affected by the tsunami.

The East Coast Highway had been closed since Sunday morning. Furthermore, we were hearing that while lots of supplies were getting to the affected areas, they were not being used. A huge pile of clothing had been collected in nagapattinam, but the people said they didn’t need clothes.

Earlier Thursday, Appa and I had watched CNN World as President Bush increased the amount of aid pledged by the United States from $11 million to $36 million.

A day later, the amount would be increased to $335 million, and two former presidents, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, were appointed to spearhead a private relief effort. Australia had already pledged $900 million and Japan a similar amount.

Then, on Friday, we flew away from the edge of the disaster zone. Yet before we could fly to Mumbai, we were reminded twice more of the waves from photographs in The Hindu.

One was of Galle International Cricket Stadium in Sri Lanka, where only a few months before the host country had played world champion Australia in a test match.

The stadium was flattened, most of the stands demolished, the grass killed by the salt water.

The second photo was of a Swedish woman named Karin Svaerd running toward the waves at Hat Rai Lay Beach in Thailand. She is running toward her husband and three sons, all of whom have seen the two waves in the background, one on top of the other, forming a wall 10-feet high perhaps 50 yards behind them. All five in this Swedish family were taken under by the waves – and somehow survived.

Friday night was spent in Mumbai celebrating the new year, and Saturday we slept most of the day.

Then, on Sunday morning, when I again awoke at 9:30 because the fan had stopped in our apartment bedroom, we would discover there was no new catastrophe. On that morning, it was only a power outage, a common phenomenon in India.

So we read The Times of India about Mumbai’s snarled traffic, a year-end stock market rally and about actress Aishwarya Rai being interviewed on “60 Minutes.”

Then, the next Sunday, we were back in Iowa. There were no power outages. Frigid Ames was peaceful.

Yet I was not quiet, at least on the inside. I realized I had developed a dependency on 24/7 coverage from NDTV and the BBC.

By the time we returned home, the U.S. media coverage of the tsunami was receding, although CNN and MSNBC occasionally provided a fix. I was no longer close and far away.

I was just far, far away and left to wonder about the people living in those Indian fishing villages and would they ever trust the sea again.

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Last updated: Jan. 31, 2005
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