‘I thought it was the end of the world’

AT first, American tourist Matthew O’Connell thought the rising sea was the sign of a good day’s surfing ahead.

Staying at a beach cottage with his Israeli girlfriend Sue, O’Connell joined hundreds of other tourists and Sri Lankans walking along the beach, inspecting the jellyfish, octopus and other sea creatures that the strange waves were dumping on the beach on a balmy Sunday morning.

But he became alarmed when the water reached the steps of his cottage - one of hundreds dotted along the southeastern Sri Lankan seaboard, a popular haunt for budget travellers.

“My girlfriend and I started gathering our stuff off the floor. We were worried our stuff would get wet,” he said.

Minutes later, their world was turned upside down.

The tsunami - triggered by an earthquake off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, more than 600 miles from Sri Lanka - sent a wave of water 15 foot high straight across the beachfront.

Their bamboo and thatch cottage shattered as if made of matchsticks and the two were sucked under the water and tossed around “like laundry in a washing machine”, he said.

The force of the water even stripped his clothes off. He found himself floating naked, more than 1,500 feet away, clinging to a log he had no recollection of grabbing.

“I thought it was the end of the world,” O’Connell said at Karapitiya Teaching Hospital, about two miles from the historic town of Galle where he and his girlfriend were being treated for their injuries.

They were two of the lucky ones. Yesterday, the corridors of the hospital were lined with bloated bodies. Virtually every minute, a car or truck would pull up at the hospital entrance, horn blaring, and another corpse would be pulled from the boot or back seat.

“We have had over 950 bodies here so far and they are still coming in,” hospital administrator Dr Jayaratne said.

Hospital workers donned face masks against the stench of decaying bodies.

Desperately anxious Sri Lankans tip-toed gingerly around the dead, looking for their loved ones, shirts pulled up to cover their noses and mouths.

One woman collapsed as she found the body of her five-year-old daughter, her tiny body bruised all over and her face locked in a grimace.

“God! God! God! Why? Why? Why?” she wailed, tearing at her hair.

More than 23,000 people are believed to have died in countries along the Bay of Bengal; more than 10,000 in Sri Lanka alone. Thousands are still unaccounted for and hundreds of thousands of people displaced.

The worst-hit area of Sri Lanka was the southeastern coastline, a densely populated area with villages nestling against the usually gentle lapping waters of the Indian Ocean.

Many of them have been wiped off the map.

In Galle, mangled wrecks of cars had been blown hundreds of metres and wrecks of boats lay smashed in the streets.

Not a single building within 100 metres of the waterfront was undamaged.

The force of the wave blew buses at the normally hectic central terminus across the square.

One had been carried through a fence and on to an adjacent cricket pitch.

The hands of the clock tower on the scoreboard were frozen at 9:25, the time the biggest wave struck.

Witnesses described a series of about five waves - with the second being the most powerful, ripping along the coast.

“After the first wave, there was almost like a sucking sound and the water almost disappeared from the bay,” said German tourist Kartsen Otte, who was about to board a small boat to go diving.