Peter Janssen
Bangkok (dpa) - It didn’t take tsunami towers and
sirens to clear the beaches of Phuket Wednesday afternoon, April 11,
shortly after a magnitude-8.6 earthquake struck off the coast of Aceh,
Indonesia.
Memories of the December 26, 2004, tsunami were
enough to make people run for their lives on the Thai island.
“Everyone in Phuket felt that shake,” Bill O’Leary, a
25-year Phuket resident, said of this week’s tremor.
“There was complete pandemonium on Patong beach, with
people running out of their shops with their laptops and passports and
getting up the hill to safety within 15 minutes,” said O’Leary, who was
on a chartered yacht when the 2004 tsunami struck Thailand’s Andaman Sea
coast, claiming 5,400 lives.
“They didn’t really need an alarm because everyone
felt the shake, and people now know that an earthquake can lead to a
tsunami,” the Australian said.
Luckily, on Wednesday, no tsunami came.
When the tsunami hit Patong, Phuket’s most developed
beach, on Boxing Day 2004, ignorance of the phenomenon was widespread.
There had not been a tsunami recorded on the island for more than a
century.
Everyone that morning also felt the magnitude-9.1
earthquake off northern Sumatra. They then watched the sea recede
hundreds of meters from Patong Bay, a telltale sign that a tsunami is
coming.
“I got washed off the beach and tangled up in a
shop’s metal security roller door,” recalled Damian Barrett, a Phuket
resident for 21 years.
“When the waves retreated, I managed to climb out of
the door and grabbed a tree to hold on to, but I dislocated my
shoulder,” Barrett said.
On Wednesday, after feeling the ground shake at his
shop at the Boat Lagoon on Phuket’s east coast, Barrett immediately
called his Thai wife and their two children but had trouble getting them
on their mobile phones because the system had been overloaded with
distress calls.
“When I finally got hold of them, I told them to stay
away from the west coast because there might be an aftershock that could
cause a tsunami,” Barrett said in a telephone interview.
His memory of a 12-metre “wall of water” crashing on
him and almost dragging him out to sea kept Barrett away from the beach
Wednesday.
“I didn’t go anywhere near the west coast,” he said.
O’Leary has different memories of the 2004 disaster.
Steering a chartered yacht that morning, O’Leary
decided to head for the tidal wave rather than head back to land and
confronted it off Krabi, south of Phuket.
“It was what you call a ball wave, from horizon to
horizon,” O’Leary recalled. “We took it head-on and got on top of it, so
we were safe.”
Such memories, and a death toll of 5,400 people, have
had a lasting impact on Phuket and the other five Thai provinces that
rim the Andaman.
Successive Thai governments have invested in a
warning system aimed at seeing that a tsunami would never take the
region by surprise again.
That warning system, involving three
tsunami-detecting buoys in the Andaman Sea and 328 warning towers up and
down the coast, kicked in Wednesday.
“The system worked perfectly,” said Captain Song
Ekmahachai, a spokesman for the National Disaster Warning Centre. “There
were no complaints.”
Had such a system been in place in 2004, thousands of
lives could have been saved, but at least a lesson had been learned.
“Everyone can crucify the Thais every time, but I
think it’s time to say, ‘Job well done,’” O’Leary said. “That said, fear
cleared those beaches a lot faster than any alarm could have.”
