The wave that shook the whole world

When billions of tons of water rose out of the ocean this week, it cared not for race, creed or status. The tsunami careered into about 12 countries but left scars far further, seeping into nearly every corner of every continent. Citizens from dozens of countries lay in the makeshift morgues of Asia as relatives kept vigils thousands of kilometres away, waiting for word of their safety.

This was the quake that shook the world, literally and figuratively. No matter the religion - Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian - many of the prayers for mercy when the waves came were in vain. Among the victims along India's Andhra Pradesh state were 32 people, 15 of them children, who had gone into the sea for a religious bath to mark the full moon day.

In Bangladesh, Christian communities who only hours earlier had been observing the joyful feast of Christmas were terrified by an almighty jolt.

Status or wealth did not matter. The lives of the rich and famous holidaying in Asia were for once as vulnerable as the farmers and villagers whose everyday existence along the Indian Ocean coastline is precarious enough.

Czech model Petra Nemcova lost her photographer boyfriend, Simon Atlee, in the tumult. Her screams of pain and anguish were as distressing as those of Rajali, a farmer in Lhokseumawe, in Indonesia's Aceh province, who lost his wife and two children. "I cannot find dry ground to bury them," cried Rajali. "What shall I do?"

Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl was rescued from his Sri Lankan holiday hotel. In Thailand, top Italian soccer players resting in the resorts fled for their lives. Others were not so lucky.

British actor and film director Lord Richard Attenborough was plunged into grief by the death in Thailand of his teenage granddaughter, daughter and her mother-in-law. A grandson of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej went missing too, swept away by a 10m wave.

In Sri Lanka, 26 children died while playing cricket on the beach, perhaps dreaming of one day playing for their country. In New Zealand, men who had achieved that dream - members of the Sri Lankan cricket touring side - longed only to be back home to help their devastated relatives and countrymen.

Shanjeev Raj, a fishing boat owner on the Karunagapally coast, India, sobbed . He had miraculously survived only to discover his mother and two children had not. "I feel my life is over. There is not enough wood to cremate their bodies. There is no privacy. I'm told my children will have to be buried in a communal grave, a pit."

The tsunami did not care for dignity. Nor did it care for political or racial allegiances. In Aceh, where separatist rebels have waged a 26-year fight with their Indonesian rulers, the guerrillas called a ceasefire.

For this week at least, Mother Nature had declared herself the enemy. Military trucks were diverted for humanitarian purposes, carrying away the dead and transporting survivors to safety.

There was no such outbreak of peace in Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers and the government kept up a war of words. The group's leaders accused the Government of failing to care about the plight of Tamil people. Government troops and Tamil Tiger foot soldiers refused to work together.

Around the world though, mankind was united in horror at the scale of the disaster.

Throughout history, there have been tragedies with higher death tolls - 830,000 people are said to have died in China in an earthquake in 1556 - but this disaster unfolded before the eyes of the world, beamed live into the living rooms of people everywhere.

"No one watching the events unfolding on our television screens can fail to be moved," said Louis Michel, the European Commissioner responsible for humanitarian aid.

Even China's state-controlled media, usually dedicated to proliferating propaganda, devoted pages to the devastation, which unfolded on a scale no one could believe.

Within the week's tragic events were incidents which were shocking, in their own right. More than 1000 people plunged to their deaths south of Colombo in Sri Lanka when waves swept the carriages of their train off the track.

Many of the dead were villagers who climbed on to the train's roof to escape the water sent their way by an event that began as just another shake on the edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire, where giant tectonic plates constantly bump and grind.

At 7.58am local time on Sunday (1.58pm NZT) residents in Banda Aceh, within point-blank range of the underwater blast, felt a violent shake. Initially, officials in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, downplayed the size of the quake, insisting it had reached only 6.4 on the Richter scale.

Locals knew better. "The ground was shaking for a long time," Yayan Zamzani told a radio station. "It must be the strongest earthquake in the past 15 years." In fact, it was the biggest quake the world has seen for 40 years - and worse was to come.

Within minutes of Zamzani's radio broadcast, the sea rose up and flooded Aceh as the huge tsunami hit land. The 10m surge sprinted across the ocean at speeds of more than 700km/h, giving people no chance to react - even if they had been warned.

In a state of panic, a man called Mustofa in Banda Aceh told El Shinta radio: "I saw four bodies of kids and five bodies of adults."

Based on this eye-witness report, the news agency Reuters issued a story on the wires just two hours after the earthquake, putting the initial death toll at nine.

As the devastation spread, the toll climbed and by yesterday it had topped 125,000. Hundreds of cubic kilometres of water over the rupture had been displaced and fanned out across the Indian Ocean.

"It's just like moving an enormous paddle at the bottom of the sea," said David Booth, a seismologist at the British Geological Society. "A big column of water has moved, we're talking billions of tons."

A scientist from the United States Geological Society, Bruce Presgrave, told the BBC: "These big earthquakes, when they occur in shallow water, basically slosh the ocean floor ... and it's as if you're rocking water in the bathtub and that wave can travel basically throughout the ocean."

The quake occurred along a 1000km-long faultline off the coast of Sumatra, where the Eurasian and Australian tectonic plates collide. It measured 9.0 on the Richter Scale and shook buildings as far away as Singapore and moved the Earth itself.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with Nasa, said the quake caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds faster and to tilt about 2.5cm on its axis.

With such a powerful trigger, it was not surprising that walls of water more than two storeys high charged across the Bay of Bengal and swamped communities thousands of kilometres away, slamming into the coasts of India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

"It all seems to have happened in the space of 20 minutes," said Jayaram Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu state, India. "A massive tidal wave of extreme ferocity ... smashed everything in sight to smithereens."

At Ko Phi-Phi, Thailand, the stretch of pristine white sand made famous in the 1999 movie The Beach, locals in jandals donned white masks to help as pall-bearers, carting away the dead foreigners. The bodies were wrapped in sheets and carried away on surfboards or bamboo poles, whatever could be found.

The waves hit Malaysia and the Maldives, too. In Burma, the military junta so keen to avoid the world's attention, admitted that 30 had died there too, most in the Irrawaddy Delta. Other reports put the death toll as high as 90.

Even the coast of East Africa, more than 4500km away from the epicentre, was subject to the devastation. More than 130 people died. Worst affected was war-ravaged Somalia.

About 95 per cent of the buildings on the Somali island of Hafun were smashed away. Kenyan authorities, acting on warnings, used riot police to clear the beaches of people, possibly saving thousands of lives. In the aftermath, people asked why the warnings that had been so useful in Kenya were not put to affect elsewhere.

Political and economic reasons, and apathy about the threat of tsunamis, have prevented countries around the Indian Ocean from setting up a warning system such as that which exists in the Pacific. But even when people did know about the impending danger, the message was not passed on.

Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii sent alerts to 26 countries, including Thailand and Indonesia, but struggled to reach the right people. "We tried to do what we could," said the centre's director, Charles McCreery. "We don't have any contacts in our address book for anybody in that particular part of the world."

Reports said Thailand's Meteorological Department may have delayed passing on the warning for fear it could damage the country's lucrative tourism industry.

Australia, with warning systems in place, said it would act to help to establish an Indian Ocean warning system. "I know it looks a bit like closing the door after the horse has bolted," said Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.

Though Australia's west coast faces the Indian Ocean, it escaped the waves, though unusual tidal surges and strong currents were noticed in the days after the quake. Fiji, American Samoa and Hawaii recorded rises in sea levels. A tidal gauge off the coast of Fiordland picked up a tiny surge, too.

The main repercussions for countries away from the direct path of the waves were the requirements to deal with the plight of their affected citizens and to help with the recovery operation.

Within 36 hours of the tragedy, diplomats from more than 20 countries had scurried from Bangkok to Phuket, popular with foreign holidaymakers. Japan dispatched an emergency team to Sri Lanka's Yala National Park after rescuers recovered the bodies of 22 Japanese tourists.

Foreign ministries set up hotlines to field calls from concerned relatives, but they were overwhelmed. Some victims criticised their governments for failing to do enough. "We need the Australian Government to go in there and find Paul," said the desperate uncle of a boy with Down's syndrome, washed away while on holiday with his parents in Phuket.

There was just so much to do. Aid agencies mounted one of the largest relief operations ever seen but, like the rest of the world, struggled to cope with the scale of the emergency.

"This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal areas, so many vulnerable communities," the UN's Emergency Relief Co-ordinator Jan Egeland told CNN.

"The longer-term effects may be as devastating as the tidal wave or the tsunami itself. Many people will have had their livelihoods, their whole future destroyed in a few seconds."

As the days ground on, the job of finding the dead, let alone counting them, stretched on. As rescue teams reached remote areas, the toll passed 125,000. The phrase "officials are only now beginning to comprehend the scale of the tragedy" became an oft-repeated cliche.

When the outside world reached India's remote Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands midweek, it was much worse than expected. Barely a third of the residents on one isle were alive.

It is feared entire primitive communities in the islands and along remote parts of the Aceh coastline have been wiped out. They were in such close proximity to the upheaval, they never stood a chance.

For once, the grief of those in Southeast Asia, so regularly and cruelly hit by natural disasters that the West becomes blase about their plight, is shared by the world.

Countries as far away as Sweden and Germany are counting the Boxing Day tsunami as one of their worst natural disasters, such has been the loss of life of their citizens.

And in New Zealand, we wait, hoping for the lives of all those missing, but warned by the Government to expect the worst.

Chronology of events since tsunami struck 

DECEMBER 26

Quake strikes off west coast of north Sumatra at 3.2670N, 95.8210E at 0758.53am (0058.53 GMT), triggering tsunami that hits countries bordering Indian Ocean over several hours. (Times in GMT).

0440: First report that tsunami hit Sri Lanka.
0450: Thailand's Phuket tourist island hit.
0555: First report from southern Indian coast that 20 people killed in Chennai (Madras) capital of Tamil Nadu state.
0630: Thai Prime Minister Shinawatra orders evacuation of devastated areas.
0750: Sri Lankan President Kumaratunga declares emergency.
0800: US Geological survey upgrades quake to 8.9, the fifth largest since 1900.
1315: Maldives declares state of emergency.
1840: Toll put at 11,300.

DECEMBER 27

0520 Sri Lanka's national Meteorological Centre says tremors detected near Sumatra and warns of more tsunamis.
0940: Toll rises to 16,421.
1600: Myanmar's military government says 34 people were killed in the Irrawaddy delta.

DECEMBER 28

0550: Toll reaches 26,013.
1630: World Health Organisation says disease could kill as many as died in tsunami.

DECEMBER 29

0005: Toll 63,114.

DECEMBER 30

0600: India puts out fresh tsunami alert and warns people to leave southeast coast areas.
0620: Toll 82,847.
1253: Toll in Indonesia's Aceh province rises sharply to 79,940.
1352: Total death toll 120,000.
1450: Toll in India 13,268
1500: Total death toll 125,500 and rising.