Word: phuket
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This winter break, Kimberly Chen ’08 gathered with her family for a reunion on the resort island of Phuket, Thailand. On Dec. 26, the Chens piled onto a boat and headed to a nearby island to go snorkeling...
...tsunami reached across the Indian Ocean to Somalia and destroyed coastlines across Southeast Asia, including Phuket. Chen and her family stopped at an island to eat, not knowing that the tsunami had just hit, and could not dock...
...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 it was something to do with the full moon," she says. And just as in Sri Lanka, people went on to the beach to collect the fish...
Those more experienced in the ways of the sea knew what was coming next. At the luxury Amanpuri Resort in Phuket, Richie Neustfisten was helping run the 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...
...those who were anywhere near the areas wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami, politics was the last thing on their mind. What was left was a humbling understanding of the awesome power of nature as the aching individual human tragedy played itself out. A Swedish man begged a Phuket hotel to let him store the coffins of his two dead children in its kitchen refrigerator. In a Buddhist temple in Bang Muang, Thailand, 180 corpses lay beneath a shelter, with an additional 80 in coffins, rigor mortis making their arms stretch out beseechingly. Fifteen hundred miles away, they were setting...