Dr Pilane Ariyananda, whose chosen title is “The Worst Day in My Life” ….. while I as Editor have imposed highlights only towards the end of this harrowing tale ….. letting Pilane’s weight of words penetrate the souls of readers because of the stark realities embedded therein.
Sunday, twenty-sixth of December 2004, the Boxing Day and the Poya Day, dawned as a quiet day, and as it was a triple holiday, there were very few people on the road. As usual, I had my morning walk on Galle Fort Ramparts and returned home around eight o’clock. After a leisurely breakfast, seated on an armchair in our veranda, I was reading the Sunday newspapers that I had picked up on my way back.
I thought I will visit the Teaching Hospital Karapitiya (THK) later in the morning, as I was on-call for the weekend. Although I heard a loud hissing noise around twenty-past-nine, with a large flock of birds passing our house, I continued to read the papers, regardless. About ten-minutes later, the gate bell rang, and we were told by our neighbours that the canal adjoining our house was overflowing. When I stepped onto the road, this old Dutch Canal better known as ‘Kunu-ela,’ was actually filling with a gorge of water rushing landwards. Never in my life, have I seen anything like this and people were shouting ‘muda galanawa’, which literally translates to ‘sea is flooding’; and they were running for lives.
I struck the panic button, and all of us who were at home – myself, Dhammika and Chirantha – quickly closed the house and rushed out like rats abandoning a sinking ship. There was no time to plan or think. As I backed up the car to the lane in front, the lane was rapidly filling with water, and we extended courtesy to the old lady next door to join us in the escape run. She took about a minute to board the car but for me, it was like an hour. Chirantha was the last to get into the car and he had to jump inside the car as the water level in the lane had swollen rapidly by then and it was almost up to the deck of the car. As I drove to the main road, I could see a wave of water on the road, rolling from the seaside carrying with it, a dislodged roof of a roadside hut. I drove landwards as fast as possible to find many people shouting and running towards the landside. We dropped the old lady at a safe point on the way, and three of us rushed to a friends’ house which was on a hill, close to my old school, Mahinda College – the highest point I could think of in Galle at that time. We were all shaken up and trembling. With very high levels of adrenaline in my body, I could still feel my heart beating, when we started to describe what happened to us in a shaking voices to our friends.
I tuned on to the car radio and learned that this was not something confined to Galle, but a national disaster. Going by the radio announcements, we learned that a tsunami wave has swept into the land for a distance about a mile stretching almost the entire coast of Eastern, Sri Lanka and hundreds of dead bodies have been brought to hospitals.
After about two-hours, I picked up some courage and walked towards our home which was about a mile away, in company of a friend who was a classmate of mine. On the way we learned that the tsunami wave was about twenty-feet at the beachfront and it had destroyed the city of Galle, while drowning hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. The tsunami wave had been brief, subsiding in about twenty-minutes leaving pools of water, here and there.
When we reached home, we found that the sliding gate had bust opened like a hinge gate due to the ferocity of the wave, bringing all sorts of muck into our garden, including plastic chairs, shoes and slippers from shops in the bazaar which were located more than half-a-mile away. Thankfully, our two dogs were alive, and had not run away despite the gate being open. They have stepped on to a ledge and waited patiently for water to drain away. I could see that water had been up to two-feet in the garden, and when I opened the house, water seemed to have been a foot-high, inside the house. All the ornamental fish that were in our courtyard pond were dead, scattered in the sitting area. My laptop and the multimedia projector that was in my study room were soaked in seawater and had to be thrown away. We had to rewire all the plug points in the ground floor of our home and change the pantry and kitchen cupboards. It took more than ten washes to get rid of the blackish slime of tsunami water that was stuck to the floor.
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Soon after visiting our home, I drove to the THK to find a chaotic hospital which was beyond any description. It was around twelve noon. Dead were brought in all sorts of vehicles, including trucks. Corpses were being unloaded in dozens from trucks, at the Out-patients Department. As the mortuary was already full, I could see the bodies being laid on the bare floor of the outpatient waiting area, in two rows. There were hundreds of them, men and women, young and old, including infants who were tucked in between adults, in their day-to-day wear, with most of the faces exposed and eyes open, some in grotesque postures. The relatives who were looking for their loved ones were there, some uncovering the faces of corpses hoping to find them. I could hear a loud wail of a mother who had just found her little child’s dead body and her pleadings to the god, asking to get back the life. In another corner, I could see a man with a dead young boy on his lap, crying loudly. It was heart wrenching to see what was happening, and I slowly slipped outside and walked towards my ward. For some strange reason, I didn’t cry or shed even a drop of tears. My emotions were numbed with thoughts frozen, and to me, everything looked so unreal.
I expected the ward to be chaotic as well, but that was not the case. The probable reason was that patients were ending up in surgical ward or the mortuary and not in the medical ward. Patients who were admitted to the surgical ward had minor cut injuries in their legs they sustained when they were running and wading through tsunami waters.
Several hundreds of people were brought dead to the THK and the hospital did not have any facilities to refrigerate them. As a couple of days went by, the area around hospital started to stink for miles due to rotting corpses as many bodies were unclaimed. There were many reasons for not claiming those bodies. The common reasons were: entire families were drowned, leaving now one to claim the body; even those who survived did not have physical or mental strength or the finances to go through the ritual of a formal funeral; and the tsunami damage to houses did not leave any dwelling for the affected to keep the dead bodies of their loved ones.
The medical school, Department of Forensic Medicine took the step of photographing and fingerprinting the dead in their own clothes and displaying them in a sort of a gallery. I saw these photographs and by the time the photos were taken some degree of facial swelling had occurred making identification difficult. After few days, a decision was taken to dispose these rotting corpses in mass burials in a local cemetery, where two huge pits were dug using a bulldozer – one accommodating five hundred and another accommodating two-hundred bodies, without coffins.
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Our medical school lost ten alumni and one student from the tsunami. Being a long weekend, most of them have been holidaying and travelling on the coastal road between Galle and Hambantota, when they were swallowed by the tsunami wave. All alumni who died were my students who were practising as doctors, and I felt really sad when I came to know that those young lives that could have saved hundreds of lives of others as doctors, had come to an abrupt end. As a Physician, I came to know endless tragic stories, but I will mention only a few.
A middle-aged man who was seeing me monthly for high blood pressure turned up after a long period of absence. I could hardly recognise him because of his long beard. I asked him why he is growing a beard. Then he wiped his tears and said that he lost three teenage daughters who were at their home which was by the seaside when the wave struck, never to be seen again and that it is the reason for not shaving the beard.
Another patient of mine mentioned that he lost his wife due to the tsunami. Two of them had been travelling in the fateful train that was washed away by the tsunami wave killing least one-thousand-seven-hundred of its passengers in Peraliya, a village, fifteen-miles north of Galle. His wife has been heavily pregnant. When the train toppled sideways when it submerged in the wave, my patient has wriggled out of the window guided by the glimmer of sunshine seen through murky waters, and surfaced to save his life, leaving his wife with the unborn child, never to see her again.
A nurse who used to assist me to see patients in one of the private nursing homes in Galle, related me this story in tears. She told me that she is looking after her sister’s baby, because her sister was swept away in the tsunami wave. Her breast-fed infant who floated on the wave with the cot which was in the veranda when the wave arrived had a miraculous escape when the cot got entangled on high branches of a nearby tree.
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Few days after the tsunami, a Sri Lanka born Australian Cardiologist working and living in Melbourne came to see me in the medical school. He had brought some life-saving drugs and equipment to be given to the THK. That was just the start of a long-term friendship we built with that doctor. He was the President of Australia-Sri Lanka Medical Aid Team (AuSLMAT), who subsequently made many trips to the THK with lots of donations by way of drugs and devices. He had a team comprising of doctors and nurses from different specialities who were able to deliver lectures for our doctors and conduct special clinics, in Karapitiya.
I have devoted a separate chapter titled ‘Health for the South Project’ in this book and it describes the contribution of the Victorian Government and the people of Victoria towards the construction of the Emergency Trauma Centre, in Karapitya.
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At national level, the immediate aftermath of the tsunami was marked by chaos and confusion. The wave hit Sri Lanka’s eastern and southern coasts, sweeping away homes, buildings, and entire villages. The death toll in our country alone was over thirty-five-thousand, with thousands more injured or missing. The scale of the devastation overwhelmed the country’s emergency services, and it took weeks for aid to reach some of the worst-affected areas.
The tsunami had a profound impact on Sri Lanka’s economy. The country’s fishing industry, which relied on coastal waters, was devastated. Over twenty-thousand fishing boats were destroyed, and the loss of life among fishermen was significant. The tourism industry, which was a significant contributor to the country’s economy, also suffered a severe blow. Many hotels and resorts along the coast were destroyed, and tourists stayed away in the aftermath of the disaster.
In addition to the economic impact, the tsunami also had a significant effect on Sri Lanka’s infrastructure. Roads, bridges, and other critical infrastructure were damaged or destroyed, making it difficult to get aid to the areas that needed it most. Many communities were cut off from the rest of the country, and it took months to restore essential services like water and electricity.
The social impact of the tsunami was also significant. Thousands of families lost loved ones, and many more were displaced from their homes. The psychological trauma of the disaster was felt by many, with some suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The tsunami also exposed deep social inequalities in Sri Lanka, with the poorest communities suffering the most.
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A REQUIEM from The Editor, Thuppahi
Speaking here as a Ceylonese citizen who was born and bred in the fort of Galle and its environs, I cannot thank Dr Ariyananda enough for the dispassionate accuracy and depth of detail within this tale. His succinct thoroughness of account –with both stark detail and broad summaries of death-toll and destruction — renders this tale a grim reminder of the human suffering wrought by the natural disaster we call a “tsunami” …. or should I say “The Tsunami”.
Around 35,000 dead in sri Lanka …. yes far less than Aceh in Sumatra, but a massive toll nevertheless.
We can also smile in thanks occasionally …… about the baby in a cot who survived because the cot lodged in the branches of a tree; and Dr Ariyananda’s two dogs who had the sense to clamber on to a ledge under the roof as the water swelled in and up and around.
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ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SHOTS of the DEVASTATION in the PLAYGROUND & CENTRAL TOWN ARENA in front of THE FORT
It’s a great narrative very sad though….what a natural tragedy.
I can’t imagine how people would have rebuilt their lives following such an unexpected disaster…difficult to fathom.
Bless those families and those who looked after them. 🙏🏽🙏🏽