Recovery and Relief Efforts in Sri Lanka and Indonesia

JIM LEHRER:

The heaviest losses from the tsunami appear to be in the small fishing villages on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. John Irvine of Independent Television News was one of the first journalists to reach that area. Here is his report.

JOHN IRVINE:

We took to sea for a new perspective on the unimaginable damage wrought by an unforeseen monster. How far inland it bit is denoted by a brown line of dead vegetation. This was a killer wave in so many ways. Look at the height it rose here. It needed to be 80 feet to break over part of this headland. For 120 miles, this shoreline looks the same. Man's creations have been pummeled by Mother Nature. This boat carrier was moored inside a breakwater. The ship smelled of lost souls.

The southwest coast of Sumatra was hit first and hit worst. Plenty of pictures have been taken from the air, but we wanted to try to feel it close up, to get an inkling of what it was like in the small fishing villages, the places where the sea sustained life and has now taken it so ruthlessly. In this village of 4,000 people, the only building still standing is the mosque. Inside the sacred place we find a villager. He said that only one out of ten people had survived here. Among the dead were his two children. When we thought it couldn't get any worse, we came to the next village. Again, the mosque was the only building still standing.

Geography had conspired against this community. It was hemmed in by hills which funneled the wave. Effectively, this place has been wiped off the face of the Earth. These are survivors in Banda Aceh, the capital of this part of Sumatra. They're alive, but the chances are they have lost most of what they associated with living. So many people now have fewer relatives and no home. And it's here that the killer wave began its assault on the city. Miraculously, there are those who witnessed what happened. I'll relay their account.

The undersea earthquake happened around 8:00. It was a pretty big shudder but nobody in Banda Aceh was overly concerned, for quakes are common here. Certainly none of the families who were on the beach on the morning of Boxing Day saw any reason to leave, and it was pretty crammed. Then, all of a sudden, something very strange happened. The sea retreated and it went back a long way, roughly 300 yards. This retreat was so quick that fish were left high and dry. Children squealed with delight as they ran around picking them up off the sand.

Nobody had any idea that this was the precursor to disaster. Rivers and canals also ran dry as the wave sucked up the water in front, only to dump it back so viciously. We walked the tsunami's path inland. The swathe it cut is so wide, it stretches as far as the eye can see in both directions. It's a wasteland. Horror on this scale has hitherto been confined to the minds of fiction writers and make-believe filmmakers. But now it's jaw-droppingly real.

These people were trying to give some dignity to the body of an eight-year-old boy. His father found him after a three-day search. His wife and two children are still missing. He believes they're dead. Nevertheless, he wants to say good-bye, and he continued his tragic quest. This couple were checking bodies. Their children are also missing. They showed us the remains of the family home, and then recounted the ghastly fate of a neighbor across the road, a man who survived the tidal wave but lay trapped for three days until he died.

Why could nobody help him?

MAN (Translated):

Because everybody is looking for their family members, so nobody can help him because everybody is busy looking for their families.

JOHN IRVINE:

Cruel choices being made.

MAN:

Yeah.

JOHN IRVINE:

Three miles inland and the dead leaves on the trees are evidence of the height and potency of the wave. Among the things it carried were a photograph album and a dead puffer fish. Two miles further on, this is the city center where the wave was still destructive and deadly. How can this place ever recover from such an apocalyptic occurrence?

JIM LEHRER:

Recovery efforts also continued on the island of Sri Lanka, which suffered the second largest number of deaths from the tsunami. Earlier today, Ray Suarez talked with Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor, in Sri Lanka.

RAY SUAREZ:

Robert Marquand, welcome. What would you say are the biggest challenges in getting aid to the worst-hit areas of the island?

ROBERT MARQUAND:

Well, right now there's a lot of coordination, there's a lot of chaos in the coordination between the center and the periphery. There's a lot of groups that have come in. In one sense, there's been so much aid that has come in, the Sri Lankans have even stopped… they've been told by different donor countries to stop sending doctors, for example.

One aid worker told me recently "We're aflood in material aid and we're aflood in money." So finding ways to get aid to the remotest areas is the most difficult part, as it is in Aceh or any other place.

RAY SUAREZ:

Have places that escaped the first wave of damage now had to contend with an influx of refugees?

ROBERT MARQUAND:

Well, there's… off of the coastline there has been a "displaced persons" exodus. It's moved into this band of territory that's between, let's say, five and ten miles inland, where a lot of the temples, the schools, the… some of the churches, and so on, that are the refugee centers.

And a lot of the people have moved from the coastal areas back to, let's say, people who are having well-paying jobs in the South, in the resort areas, or fairly good-paying jobs, may have actually had relatives or even homes in the center of the country. So you've got a lot of people, some… and many of them without much money or means of support coming back in. And that's creating a little bit of pressure.

RAY SUAREZ:

Well, they need not only some place to get clean water, but they also need, for instance, to use the toilet. It must be a terrible burden for some of those towns.

ROBERT MARQUAND:

Well, especially along the coastline that's true. In fact, we talked to the health minister in Galle a couple days ago. And he said actually that these portable latrines are the things that they've been asking for the most. That's the most necessary element that's now missing. And they want these latrines because all of the places that people were using have been washed away.

RAY SUAREZ:

Is there also a rumor mill? Are people spreading ideas and news that are leading to more fear in the country?

ROBERT MARQUAND:

Well, there is, I think, a… I think people who have gone down there and spent some time in the South realized that, as one person said, food and medicine is important, but there's also a problem with the mentality. There's a great deal of fear still among people. These are often simple, simple people. They don't have access to televisions. And there has been a lot of discussion about another tsunami which is coming. There have been two scares to that effect.

People…some people are afraid of the ocean; people are worried about diseases. They're worried about actually… there have been cases of banditry. Two of the jails along the southern coasts were flooded, and all of the inmates got out. And there's reports… there are confirmed reports, including some of the journalists who have been robbed in the South. So there's a lot of chaos, and still people sometime haven't picked up the pieces yet.

RAY SUAREZ:

Is Sri Lanka also finding a challenge from its long-simmering civil conflict? There were already splits in the country before that water came ashore.

ROBERT MARQUAND:

Sure. And, you know, a lot of the aid people will say it's one thing when you've got just… you only have to administer to people who are in need, but in this case you've got a disaster which is taking place within the middle of an armed struggle. Of course there has been a cease-fire for two years, but there has been still a lot of serious bad blood between the Tamil Tigers in the North and the Sinhalese ethic government in the south. There are mixed reports, actually, about this.

At the personal level, we're hearing a lot of stories about Tamils returning Sinhalese bodies, and Sinhalese returning Tamil bodies in cooperation. And President Kumaratunga, you know, too, has made… a lot of people are making the case– whether it's being heard or not no one really knows, or whether there's too much cynicism– there is the case being made that this a huge disaster that ought to be able to allow people to rethink at some fundamental level what it means to be a Sri Lankan, how they're going to get along with each other, and so on.

Some of the… one of the people I talked to said, "Well, after Hiroshima, the Japanese were able to pick up and kind of move forward." He was thinking it was a similar situation here where there could be some kind of similar rethinking of… at a very basic level of some fundamental questions about how to get along with each other.

RAY SUAREZ:

In general, looking back over the last several days, would you say that things are getting better, that there's more system now to the aid that's being carried out?

ROBERT MARQUAND:

I think there is… you can see it up and down the coastline, these little fires are burning where there's been debris, there is… bulldozers are out, helicopters are flying around, aid convoy trucks are zipping around the island. You've got a feeling that people are starting to address things, and that some of the levels of shock are subsiding. But it's a fairly deep… it's 700 miles of coastline, two- thirds of the country has been affected by this. And it's going to take some time.

And to be reminded as well, the country here has not had a lot of experience with big building projects and lots of repetitive growth cycles, so most of the structures along the South coast, and any of the coastlines, have been carefully built up patch by patch over a long period of years. And so to see it suddenly wiped out in one day has created some, you know, some worry among people. They can't quite imagine how… it's almost as if the natural order has been completely interrupted. They're trying to figure out how is all of that going to be rebuilt? It's a lot to grasp.

RAY SUAREZ:

Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor, thanks for being with us.

ROBERT MARQUAND:

Thank you.