Five years have passed and I still find it hard to talk about the tsunami. When the subject comes up my throat still constricts, choking back the horror and raw pain that I saw and more shockingly, the way the rest of the world seemed to carry-on with daily life. Relief came – sometimes too much of it, but nothing prepares a photographer for the shock of returning to normality from a disaster zone.
I was in Phuket the day before Christmas, dodging the bullet perhaps as my ground floor room would certainly have become my tomb. Back in Singapore the news broke and I flew to Sri Lanka, arriving at the center of the destruction 24 hours after the waves. My first stop was a hospital outside Galle. Hundreds of bodies lay on the damp concrete floor, children in fetal positions next to what rescuers assumed were their parents. Some of them had bandages and IV’s telling the story of the pathetic struggle to save them, others just looked like they were asleep, still in pajamas but slowly bloating.
Blood and bodily fluid and the stark stench of decomposition. I worked the scene like a vulture, the lenses my shield; my shock at the scene my helmet; technical adjustments on the cameras my distraction from the horror. I edited on the fly, transmitting a few images via satphone and moving onto more death. It is only that night as I look through my day’s take that the tears come, as the reality of what I saw hits me – there is no lens now. Only the hard truth in 2 megabyte files on a dusty laptop screen.
The destruction was complete – nothing within a few hundred yards of the beach was untouched. As we drove into Galle, a few miles out of town, life was normal. Schoolgirls walked to school, mothers hung laundry outside modest homes and markets were open. The sheer contrast from the normal Sri Lanka I love and the damage was instantaneous and merciless. We moved north, meeting a diving buddy who had lost his dive school and all his staff; some Swedish friends who had lost their hotel and thousands more bodies. The Sri Lankans were stoic, burying the dead methodically, guarding their emotions – numb with shock.
Further north we entered a community of Muslims that has been completely flattened. Muslims buried Hindus, Christians and Buddhists – praying for them, hoping their onward journey was complete wherever they go. A stern-faced army general arrived to assess the damage and the security situation. The bodies were extracted from huge piles of concrete by hand and the mass graves were in shallow beach sand. “They are all Muslims now” said one of the grave diggers.
In Batticaloa we hitched a ride on a Sri Lankan army helicopter – unsure of its destination. My seat had no seatbelt and the old Huey had no doors. I hung on for my life while trying to shoot. Below us the land was flooded by heavy rains, adding insult to injury and a new toll of casualties. We landed at Ampara Air Force base and spent the day going up in helicopters, yelling passport details to the ground controller before each flight in case we went down. We delivered body bags, water and rations to several small villages. The Indian Air Force arrived in big Hinds helicopters to help the relief effort. It all seemed futile.
Ten days and one shower later I was back in Colombo. Journalists flooded the five star hotels – an army of beige photo vests and cameras. I was tired, heading directly for my flight to Singapore. I stunk, I had a throat infection, my shoes were moist with blood and old rotten water. At the airport I saw one of my pictures on the front of the Financial Times and thought back to the old man in the picture who lost most of his family, his head cradled in his hands, an IV plug still in his hand. My problems were nothing. They were embarrassingly trivial, but I was not getting onto the crisply sanitized Singapore Airlines 777 with my bloody sneakers. In Singapore an immigration officer saw me bare footed and broken. “You have been in Sri Lanka? Welcome home.” I broke down briefly – all around me people were buying duty free booze and watches. It didn’t seem right.
“Where were you when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit?”
For me, it is a day I will always remember. I had barely been working as a picture sub-editor on the Asia Desk for a month. I remember being asked to come in early to work that Sunday morning because “an earthquake had hit and it seems quite bad”.
Reaching the office, I watched my television colleagues collect their gear, make phonecalls and fly off on the next flight to Aceh, one of the places reported as being badly hit. The newsgathering process was still very new to me, so I watched with fascination as photographers were alerted, flights were arranged and notes were made to keep track of where each shooter was.
A man reacts next to a building that was destroyed when a tsunami hit in Cuddalore, 180 km (112 miles) south of the southern Indian city of Madras December 27, 2004. REUTERS/Arko Datta
Would Bazuki Muhammad drive from his base in Kuala Lumpur all the way to Khao Lak in Thailand? How was Luis Ascui going to get to Phi Phi island from Phuket? How much longer would Altaf Hussain in New Delhi have to wait to secure a ride to the Andaman and Nicobar islands?
All this while the aftermath of the tsunami continued to unfold. I remember sitting, waiting for the first photos as updates of locations where the tsunami had hit and the resulting death toll kept rolling in.
While we were fortunate enough not to experience first-hand the devastation wrought by the 100 foot waves, we did witness the scale of the destruction across Asia as the photos started arriving.
From bodies strewn haphazardly across beaches, to survivors hysterically searching for relatives and children walking about dazedly in relief centers, we too on the desk had front-row seats to the disaster.
Clockwise from top: An Acehnese women covers her nose as she walks past thousands of dead bodies in the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh December 27, 2004. REUTERS/Beawiharta
Submerged building near the pier at Ton Sai Bay in Thailand’s Phi Phi island, December 28, 2004. REUTERS/Luis Enrique Ascui
Survivors look at the pictures displayed on a board identifying their relatives at Velankani beach, India, December 28, 2004. REUTERS/Punit Paranjpe
Two of our editing staff, Luis Ascui and Thomas White, had flown off to reinforce coverage in Thailand and Sri Lanka respectively, leaving a skeleton crew of three working flat-out from seven in the morning to eleven at night daily.
We had constant discussions with Steve Crisp (my boss who I couldn’t help but notice was too busy to shave) about what photos to transmit to clients – how much gore was too much? Did we need to show bloated and dismembered bodies – was that necessary or gratuitous?
In the end we moved most frames, as gruesome as they were, because they were a true reflection of the situation and a reminder that sometimes life just isn’t that pretty.
One-year-old Hannes Bergman of Sweden, whose mother went missing in the tsunami, is held by a caretaker at a hospital in Thailand’s tourist island of Phuket on December 28, 2004. REUTERS/Bazuki Muhammad
Robert Simmons from London and girlfriend Da catch a sunset from a shattered board walk on Patong beach in the Thai resort island of Phuket December 28, 2004. REUTERS/Adrees Latif
Nonetheless, I appreciated that the photographers were able to balance such shots with others that were subtle, yet showed compassion and afforded dignity to the victims and survivors.
I learned a photograph of a toy bunny left on the tracks of a train tipped over by the waves along a Sri Lankan coast could tell the story as much as an aerial shot of bodies piled up at a makeshift morgue in Banda Aceh. One did not need to show an entire body to show death, a limb was more than enough as Arko Datta’s winning World Press Photo proved.
An Indian woman mourns the death of her relative in Cuddalore, some 180 km (112 miles) south of the southern Indian city of Madras December 28, 2004. REUTERS/Arko Datta
Stories of hope and survival became increasingly important as the days wore on, when rescue efforts turned into recovery work. Photographs of medical crews from around the world, who were chipping in to help the affected countries, were as well-received and sought after as those of survivors from foreign lands who had relatives eagerly awaiting news of their loved ones.
Five years on, there have been countless natural disasters, from Hurricane Katrina to the Sichuan earthquake, but none have impacted me as much as the Indian Ocean tsunami, perhaps because it was my first big disaster.
