Floating graveyard rescue by fishermen the tsunami forgot
Floating graveyard rescue by fishermen the tsunami forgot
Nurdin Husin, Agence France-Presse/Sigli
Muhammed and the crew of his Indonesian fishing trawler failed to notice when one of the most destructive forces in living memory rolled beneath their boat as it bobbed on the Indian Ocean.
"We did not feel anything, we were in the middle of nowhere that Sunday morning," he said, taking a long drag on his clove- flavored cigarette.
The next day, still oblivious to the carnage unleashed on shores across Asia by tsunamis created by the gargantuan 9.0- magnitude quake, Muhammed and his men blithely cruised inshore, launching a dinghy to buy fresh food.
Only when they began to row the tiny boat inland through a floating layer of splintered furniture and plastic containers did the full horror of what had hit the small northwest Indonesian town of Calang become apparent.
"We saw the first body, that of a man," Muhammed recalled. "And then many more quickly appeared."
The crew was puzzled at first, Muhammed said, the curiosity drawing them closer until their dinghy was surrounded on all sides by corpses, bloated by the heat and saturated with ocean water.
They had inadvertently stumbled on a stretch of shoreline which would have taken the full force of the seismic barrage. An area that even four days after the quake was still mostly cut off from the outside world.
Of the tens of thousands of people killed in the Indonesian province of Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, many were from Cepang and along the coast of the province, stretching in either direction to the cities of Banda Aceh and Meulaboh.
With large areas of the shore still under water and buildings razed to the ground, there were few survivors in the area.
Just as Muhammed and his crew were about to turn away in horror, they caught sight of a waving hand and rowed over to find three men and a woman clinging to a floating pile of planks.
Enfeebled by their ordeal, the men explained what had happened and begged for rescue. They also mentioned the woman, who was too weak to talk, was Javanese -- often distrusted by the people of Aceh, who accuse them of siphoning off the province's resources.
"At a time like that, who cares whether she is a Javanese or an Acehnese. We are all humans," Muhammed said, who was at that time unaware his own home in the village of Lampaseh, near Banda Aceh, was swept away by the tsunami.
But the rescue mission was far from complete. With the four survivors needing medical help, the boat headed north for the offshore island of Sabang.
On their way they encountered another fishing vessel whose crew told them to forget Sabang or even Banda Aceh as both had been badly hit.
"They told us to go farther because every port between there and beyond Banda Aceh was completely destroyed by the angry sea," Muhammed said.
Following the coastline they only found scenes of devastation, until they left the Indian Ocean for the Malacca Strait and finally met a navy patrol boat off the town of Sigli, 75 kilometers east of Banda Aceh.
The navy vessel took the four ashore for medical treatment, accompanied by Muhammed and his shipmates.
But for the 30-year-old captain, the journey was not over.
"I myself, am restless, because I want to know what has happened to my own family back in Lampaseh. I was told my hamlet was completely destroyed," he said, his face lined with apprehension.