Limerick woman flees Samoan tsunami with baby in arms
Survivors fled the 20ft waves of water for higher ground on the SouthPacific islands after the magnitude 8.0 quake struck at 6.48am local time and sparked the tsunami.
Last night her brother Shane recalled his sister’s horror after the tsunami destroyed her hotel.
“I spoke to her on the phone and she told me what happened.
“They didn’t get an official warning. She felt the earthquake and it was as bad as anything she had ever experienced out there. The assistant manager of the hotel looked out the window and all he saw was the sea receding – it was just being sucked right out and all the coral reefs were exposed. So they knew what was happening that the sea was being pulled out before coming back in again and everyone ran.”
He said his 30-year-old sister, from Clareview, helped evacuate the Salani Surf Resort hotel she manages before fleeing with her husband, Nick Shannon, and 16-month-old boy, Eoin.
“They got all the guests out but the scary thing was that the next door village, Salani, didn’t even know the wave was coming,” said Shane. “There were little children walking to school so they shouted at them to warn them and then they ran home and told the people.
“Everyone was running for higher ground. Theresort had jeeps but most of the Samoan people don’t have cars so anyone who had one was ferrying people to the bottom of the hills and they walked up from there. That’s what Triona did along with everyone else.”
Triona’s hotel is on the main island of Upolu, which bore the brunt of the terror wave.
Triona’s childhood friend, Limerick woman Georgina Miller, was also with her. The 30-year-old from Ashbrook on theEnnis Road was visiting her old school friend and had stayed for several weeks as part of a round-the-world trip.
Yesterday she fled theisland along with Triona and her family. The group jetted to Australia where they will stay with Nick’s parents in the Gold Coast.
Shane said: “They’ve lost everything, the business they worked in – everything is gone. They will stay with Nick’s family for now and then decide what to do next.”
The O’Neill family was last night relieved to know that Triona and her family are alive and well.
“Triona called them quickly, within an hour, so that was a great relief,” said Shane. “I spoke to her myself sometime later, she was shocked but she was fairly cool about it.”
Triona O’Neill has managed the resort hotel for four years along with her Australian husband.
The quake was centred about 193km south of the islands of Samoa, which has about 180,000 people, and American Samoa, a US territory of 65,000.
Four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet high roared ashore on American Samoa about 15 minutes after the quake, reaching up to a mile inland.
The Samoan capital, Apia, was virtually deserted by afternoon, with schools and businesses closed.
Hours after the waves struck, sirens rang out with another tsunami alert and panicked residents headed for higher ground again, although there was no indication of a new quake.
In American Samoa’s capital of Pago Pago, the streets and fields were filled with ocean debris, mud, overturned cars and several boats as a massive cleanup effort stretched into the night.
Several buildings in the city – just a few feet above sea level – were flattened. Power was expected to be out in some areas for up to a month.
Hampered by power and communications outages, officials in the South Pacific islands struggled to determine damage and casualties.
Samoan police commissioner Lilo Maiava told said devastated areas were still being searched.
Joey Cummings of radio station 93KHJ in PagoPago told the BBC that he and his colleagues watched from a balcony as a 15-foot tsunami wave struck, and “the air was filled with screams”.
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