Audrey Desiderato had just finished the mask removal drill, one
of the many skills needed to receive her scuba diving license, when
the tsunami passed through.
Desiderato, a fourth-year political science and economics
student, was vacationing on Phi Phi Island in Thailand. She was on
her fourth open-water dive and taking her license test with her
sister and best friend on the morning of Dec. 26, the day a
magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered a tsunami
that hit the coasts of Southeast Asia.
The first thing Desiderato had noticed when they went down was
the decrease in fish compared to previous dives. The visible fish
were not dispersing when they came into contact with the diving
group, as they had done on the other days.
Desiderato had just slipped her mask back on when the currents
started.
“We were kneeling on the seabed when we started swaying
back and forth and being dragged back,” she said. The divers
tried to hold onto the rocks, but the current had complete control
of their movement. Sea urchins were flying by her, and there was
sand and silt everywhere.
Desiderato’s ignorance and inexperience kept her from
panicking.
“I didn’t know what was going on, so I was able to
stay calm,” she said. “It seemed forever, but it had to
have been less than a minute,” she added.
Her parents, who had been diving separately, were swept 5
kilometers away and 11 meters deeper. When the wave passed and they
surfaced, they found out that the captain aboard the boat had felt
nothing.
The calm of the surface was not surprising to Professor Tony
Orme of UCLA’s geology department. On the surface of the open
ocean, tsunamis are only felt as a slight swell ““ they are
generally felt further out at greater depths, he said.
“Tsunamis in the past have stirred up organisms never even
seen before,” Orme added. The abnormal behavior of the animal
life prior to the tsunami was also not strange to Orme.
“Organisms sense things in ways that we as humans do
not,” he said.
The timing of the dive turned out to be serendipitous. The group
had been diving for the previous three days at a later time.
“We had happened to leave early to do an extra dive. The
day before we had gone out at 10:30,” Desiderato said.
“The sequence of events was so lucky.”
The boat captain did not speak English, so Desiderato and her
group were unaware of what had happened ““ they only knew they
could not return to the island yet.
The boat stayed out on the now pristine sea until mid-afternoon,
when they headed closer to the island. Docking was impossible due
to the debris and bodies that covered the shoreline.
A shaken tourist boarded the boat and explained what happened,
but they were still unaware of the extent of the damage.
Desiderato’s boat stayed close to the island until night,
collecting survivors. The dive-masters returned to the island to
search for the dive shop’s owner.
The owner’s wife and son were found, but a friend had
witnessed him and his two girls wiped out by the wave.
Rather than heading back to the larger island of Phuket, the
captain brought them to the small island that had no visible
damage. There, the locals took them into their homes, feeding them
and going door-to-door to collect blankets for them.
“The people had almost nothing, but they gave what little
they had,” Desiderato said.
There was a single television on the island, where they were
finally able to see the massive damage the tsunami had caused.
The group headed back to Phuket the next day, where emergency
centers were organized by various embassies to get their citizens
home. There was also a victim’s board set up for people to
identify the bodies of their loved ones. Desiderato, a French
citizen, found the French embassy’s tent, where she was
fingerprinted, given clothes and asked to fill out a police
report.
“It was chaotic. … People lost everything. (There were)
people looking for their kids, kids looking for their
parents,” she said.
Local residents responded to the tragedy in a variety of ways.
People opened up their hotels, there were free call centers
everywhere, and those with cars offered rides throughout the city.
Desiderato and her family flew back to Bangkok and then to their
home in Malaysia. She felt fortunate to be able to leave the
area.
“Grasping how lucky you are in that situation is really
overwhelming,” she said. “I had a place to go home to.
And now I’m back in the United States and everything is
normal, but back there everything is chaos and hell.”
Desiderato, who grew up in nine different countries and plans on
working in the developing world, said her direction in life was
affirmed when she saw how the lack of infrastructure and
ill-equipped governments resulted in “devastation that is
unimaginable.” The United Nations reported the death toll at
over 165,000 as of Tuesday.
For now, Desiderato marvels at the good fortune of having her
family and friend with her the entire time, and says that she was
“shielded a lot” from what was really going on.
“I’m still trying to figure out what I’m
supposed to do with this luck,” she said.