One Man's Escape from a Tsunami (Perspective)

by Ian Gill

Tsunami, Sri Lanka 2004, photo courtesy of China Daily(HN, March 14, 2011) -- Six years ago on the evening of Christmas Day 2004, Prianka, a senior project specialist at a regional development bank, was staying at a friend’s home near the beach at Hikkaduwa, 60 miles south of Colombo, on Sri Lanka’s west coast.

His friend called him out to admire the reflection of a full moon shimmering in the pool. For some reason, his friend chose this moment to wax philosophical.

“Don’t get too attached to your possessions,” he said. “Everything changes, nothing is permanent.”

The following morning, Prianka relaxed over breakfast and texted his daughter, who was holidaying in Sweden, that he planned to go the beach 300 meters away.

The next instant, his world collapsed into madness.

“I heard people running along a gravel path leading up from the beach. They were yelling and one was shouting, ‘The sea is flooding.’ I thought, ‘How could that happen?’ It was bright and sunny and there had been no rain,” he recalls.

“We went out on the road and I saw a meter high wall of water coming towards us. It was taking everyone who was running. It hit one old lady behind her knees and she fell and was swept away.

“My friend said he wanted his cell phone, but I grabbed him and shouted, ‘Let’s run!’ I asked the house boy ‘Is there a hill nearby?’ He said, ‘Yes, about a kilometer away,’ so we started running.

“I had flip flops but lost them at the first wall I jumped over. I was barefoot, running through people’s yards and leaping over fences, but I have never run so fast, even when I ran track at high school.

“We must have run 500 meters when the water caught up with us and pushed us. I saw this little girl standing on a mound while her mother was trying to carry her other daughter. I grabbed the girl with my left arm. I stumbled. If I had fallen, I would have gone, but the house boy grabbed my arm and saved us.

“I realized I couldn’t run with the girl, or both of us would die. So I left her on a pile of bricks. I don’t know what happened to her. I still feel horrible about it.”

Sri Lanka 2004, Little Girl wandering in debris after tsunami hit, photo courtesy of Topnews“We finally reached this mound with a Buddhist shrine on top. It was about 30 feet high and I climbed to the top. The water rushed around and surrounded us. I didn’t know what had happened or what to do.

“Suddenly, I heard this echoing sound like the helicopters in the movie ‘Apocalypse Now’. We were 2 km inland and I could see this huge wall of water heading for us, taking houses and trees, everything.

“I had been watching this concrete outhouse to check the ground level. The water lifted it like someone lifting a child and carried it towards us. We were close to a tree and I told my friend to hang on to the tree. The water ran up our hill and abruptly stopped.

“There were about 200 people on our hill, and it was utter confusion with people screaming and pulling bodies out of the water. I saw one man with his ear torn off and another missing two fingers.

“We stayed there for over two hours and when the water receded to knee-level we decided to come down as we didn’t want to stay until dark. We waded for two hours in knee-deep water until we came to dry ground.

“We tried to hitchhike to Colombo, but people didn’t want to take us. Every vehicle was full. People thought it was the end of the world. When we did get a ride, twice the vehicles ran out of gas, but the gas stations had closed with the owners hoping to charge higher prices later.

Aftermath of 2004 tsunami, Sri Lanka, photo courtesy of NOAA“I got back to Colombo at 4 in the morning, nearly 18 hours after I had started running. I had no way of communicating with anyone because my friend and I had left our cell phones at the house. When I called my family in Sweden, they had been desperately trying to reach me, but to no avail.  After having read my text message and seen the events on TV, my family had feared the worst.

“My feet were swollen from running barefoot, but otherwise I had only a scratch on my knee. When I think of all the things that could have happened I was incredibly lucky. If we had decided to go anywhere but the hill, if the house boy hadn’t been there, if I had slipped…”

A couple of days later, Prianka accompanied his friend back to Hikkaduwa with food and medicine.

At the ruined home, they found six bodies.

That evening, the moon was full again and shone onto the pool. But instead of shimmering water, the moonbeams spotlighted the bloated corpse of a woman in white floating amid black water and debris.

- Ian Gill is a freelance writer based in Manila