It was a hair-raising boat journey to the Phi Phi islands a few days after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami wrecked many of the tourist resorts and fishing villages along the Andaman coast of Thailand. It wasn’t clear what would be at the end of our ride.
For this reporter, it’s hard to believe 10 years have passed since the St Stephen’s Day tsunami. The pictures are so fresh in my mind.
Approaching land, there was debris bobbing along the shoreline of the smaller, vegetation-covered limestone islands just offshore, sheer cliffs rising out of the sea; then we turned into Ton Sai bay on Phi Phi Don, the bigger of the islands.
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It reminded me of a scene from the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now. Helicopters took off and landed, fires burned rubbish on the beach, and large military barges, stacked with bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting, were being moved off the island.
A three-metre high wave hit Ton Sai village on Phi Phi at 10.37 on the morning of December 26th.
At the time, it looked like the village had been picked up and dropped by some angry giant. Around 4,000 people are believed to have died on Phi Phi, though the numbers will never be known.
It was here that three of the four Irish victims of the tsunami died.
Among them was Lucy Coyle (28), from Killiney, who died with her English boyfriend Sean Sweetman. Eilis Finnegan (27), from Ballyfermot, who was with her boyfriend Barry Murphy on Phi Phi island when the wave struck. Barry survived the ordeal. Connor Keightley (31), from Cookstown, Co Tyrone, also lost his life on Phi Phi.
Unlike other major international events, natural disasters like the Asian tsunami are difficult for those left behind as there is no recourse, no one to blame.
The tsunami killed 228,000 people in 11 countries, the majority in Indonesia. As well as the cost in human lives, the tsunami cost around one million people their livelihoods.
Finding closure can be hard, as it’s no one’s fault. It’s not an act of terrorism, there is no hunt for Osama bin Laden, no Isis, no al-Qaeda, merely an awful tragedy and a reminder that nature is a monstrously powerful force.
Thais would often say to me in the days after the tsunami: “You didn’t shut New York down after 9/11, so don’t write us off now after the tsunami.”
Worst impact
Dan Mulhall, currently Ireland’s ambassador to Britain, was the envoy to Malaysia and Thailand and was living in Kuala Lumpur when he got a call on St Stephen’s Day while he was having lunch with his children.
Initially it was hard to work out where the worst impact was, but he established that Thailand was among the worst affected places, and he arrived at the emergency centre in Phuket around lunchtime the following day.
“My job was to track down Irish people who may have been caught up in the tsunami. We had a couple of thousand Irish people on our list – it’s a sign of how many Irish people were travelling at that time. A large number could have been affected,” he said.
This was the nerve centre for the rescue mission for southern Thailand, with helicopters flying in and out with dead and wounded, bringing relatives to the disaster areas, and occasionally flying in politicians such as Colin Powell and Jeb Bush.
This was also where a large wall of photographs of the missing soon sprang up. It was a frightening collage.
“What affected me most were the photographs on the board in the emergency centre of the young families who were probably lost in the tsunami. Most of them were holiday snaps of people enjoying themselves in the prime of life. A whole wall of those people who you had to presume were lost,” said Mulhall.
In Phuket, regulars at Lek Murphy’s Irish Pub on Soi Sansabei in Patong spoke of how they had had a late night on Christmas Day and so were still in bed when the tsunami hit.
Some images linger: elephants helping with the rescue effort, pushing back large pieces of debris to allow rescuers better access; the devastated upmarket resort of Khao Lak was where the wave came far inland and destroyed 70 per cent of buildings; a Thai Navy warship, dropped in a field nearly two kilometres from the shoreline; the omnipresent monks, who moved in groups, blessing the dead, helping with DNA sampling and assisting with burials.
Many who died would never be identified, as their bodies would not be found.The true death toll is still hard to work out. Officially 8,200 people died in the tsunami in Thailand, but the numbers of missing and the unregistered dead make this an unreliable figure.
The number of dead in Khao Lak is estimated at around 4,000 but unofficially people say 10,000 perished, because many of the Burmese fishermen who died were living there illegally and were never counted.
Among those who died in Khao Lak was Michael Murphy ( 23), from Ballyconnigar, Co Wexford.
The general consensus is that the Thais handled the situation very well, and thereby avoided what would have been a total disaster for the tourism industry, accounting for around 20 per cent of GDP and responsible for 2.5 million jobs.
“The Thais managed it very well. They put together a system of identification,” says Mulhall. “Four or five years ago I went back. I didn’t want Thailand to be a place of tragedy and destruction. It was a good thing to go back, as I now have a different memory of Phuket. The fact they coped so well has stood to them as a tourist destination,” said Mulhall.
Early-warning systems
Lessons were learned from the tsunami. All along the coastline now there are early-warning systems. In April 2012, it went off after an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, and the tsunami warning systems are now a part of life in coastal areas.
As a direct result of the tsunami, Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now has a crisis centre, which has been a great resource whenever there have been issues involving Irish people abroad.
The tsunami was the first tragedy of global tourism. Europeans, mostly Scandinavians, Germans and French, were affected by a disaster thousands of miles from home.
The main tourist areas hit by the great waves were in Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Tourist numbers to Thailand had grown at a terrific pace, and the beaches of Phuket and Krabi were crowded with poorly built structures, and hotels built without thought for what natural consequences their positioning might have.
The wave intensified, or gave fresh urgency to, the debate on sustainable tourism and regional development.
Locals I spoke to then feared the tourists would never come back. But they have come back, in even greater numbers, and there has been a construction boom with many luxury hotels opening up resorts.
The memorials are there but, as is nature’s way, life goes on.
