Word: beachings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just one collection point in the city, authorities have gathered 3,500 corpses. On the Andaman coast in Thailand, soldiers are using an ax and a spade to dig out the body of a woman half-buried beneath a palm tree. Fifty miles south in Patong, a honky-tonk beach town on Phuket Island, 100 bodies are laid out in front of a morgue that has room to refrigerate only two. In Batticaloa, on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, dozens of men have lined up on either side of a bridge, watching for bodies trapped underwater...
...shore before a crest, the first thing that anyone on shore notices is not water rushing onto the land but the opposite. That is what happened in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In the Sri Lankan town of Trincomalee, a hotel manager remembers the sea rushing out so the beach became magically full of gorgeous, colorful, stranded fish. "Men ran down to the shore with gunny-bags and stuffed them full of fish," he says. On Phuket, Tiina Seppanen, a Finn, 20, on vacation with her sister and mother, also noticed that the tide had gone way out. "People were saying...
...resort's water-skiing fleet when he noticed that the water had disappeared. He called his boss, Bill O'Leary, an Australian in charge of the Amanpuri boatyard, who was at sea with clients. O'Leary knew the signs. He told Neustfisten to get everyone off the beach and called friends at other hotels to tell them a tsunami was coming. The Amanpuri beach was cleared. About five minutes later, the waves started rolling in. Seppanen, a few miles away, saw the horizon rise and a wall of water approach, bringing with it small boats with anchors dangling. "At first...
...colleagues struggled to answer the phones and assure callers that the quake was nowhere near Bangkok. He says he didn't have time to inform his boss before the wave hit, but he had no need to. Sumalee Prachuab, who supervises the Bangkok office, was having breakfast at a beach resort in Cha-Am in southeast Thailand when a local monitoring station told her about the quake. By 9 a.m., she knew that the shock had been off Sumatra, and the Bangkok office had started to fax details to local radio and TV stations. But the duty officer concedes that...
...people know what to do when they hear a tsunami is coming. "It's very much a matter of having the education in place," McFadden says. "In many cases, you know what happens if you tell people there's going to be a tsunami? They go down to the beach to have a look." And given the size of the earthquake, it is hard to believe that any warning system would have saved many lives in Aceh, where the majority of the deaths occurred...