Word: phuket
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...images that inevitably brought to mind the Bali terrorist bombing of 2002 - and slowly came to grips with the scope of the catastrophe. "It was awful," said Astrid von Sternheim, 27, as she waited at Frankfurt Airport for her parents Werner and Diana to arrive from Patong Beach in Phuket. "We saw the pictures on television and recognized the street and the hotels." Her parents survived because they happened to be on an upper floor. Families were torn apart, lovers separated forever, by the merciless waves that made no distinction between rich and poor, famous and unknown. A British woman...
...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 to pop up to the surface...
...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...
...Phuket Tsunami Photo Gallery...