- As people lie dead in Indonesia, unsuspecting tourists in Thailand awaken to a hot, sunny December day. There’s no tsunami detection system in the Indian Ocean; scientists who monitor quakes see a big one but don’t know if it has generated giant waves and can’t warn people anyway.
Half an hour since the earthquake, which lightly rattled Thailand, the waves are steaming toward shore. Divers off the Thai coast are sucked deep into suddenly murky water. The tsunami slows and rises as it nears land.
Kevin Aldrich, 28, of New Orleans awakens around 8:30 a.m. to a persistent banging on the door of his Khao Lak hotel room.
Aldrich and his 29-year-old Canadian girlfriend, Sonya Sagan, wanted to sleep in after arriving late Christmas night to their beachfront hotel.
“Who in the hell is banging at my door at this hour?” Aldrich asks himself.
The door blows open. Dirty, sandy seawater swirls up the walls. Aldrich and Sagan leap from their bed, and the mattress begins floating on the rising water, which shatters the patio door. Aldrich and Sagan step outside to find the sea has moved inland.
Khao Lak will become one of the worst hit beaches in Thailand. It’s a low-lying tourist haven, especially popular with Swedes, Norwegians and Germans.
Aldrich and Sagan scale the hotel’s low-slung roof, about 25 feet up. Water keeps rising. Aldrich hears babies crying but can’t locate the source. Behind him is a crackling and crumbling sound. A huge swell blasts the hotel, silencing the crying and knocking the couple from the roof. The hotel collapses under the foaming waves.
Aldrich is deep in the water and scrambling to figure out which way is up. He collides with a coconut tree on his ascent, grabs on, squirming up the trunk to find air. Bodies, trees and wood flow by.
The wave pushes Sagan away from the hotel and her boyfriend. She latches onto a piece of wood and rides the current, which leads her to a string of downed power lines.
As she nears the lines, debris piles up and she’s pushed underwater. She draws a deep breath.
“I thought I was a goner,” she says later. “I was pretty calm about the whole thing. I just wanted the whole thing to be over. As I began to lose consciousness, all of a sudden I was pushed up.”
The lines snap. It’s like a dam breaking; she rockets through the water. Hands from people trapped below reach up to grab her legs and arms as she skitters by.
Aldrich and Sagan go days without knowing whether the other survived. Aldrich searches the hospital and calls his family. He finally sends an e-mail to his girlfriend. “I’m alive,” he writes. “I’m hoping that you’re out there and you’re OK.” He finds her at another hospital, battered and bruised.
They are among the few survivors on a beach of death. The roiling waves destroy hotels, deposit ships a half-mile inland, crumple cars and push busloads of people into watery graves. At least 2,500 people died at Khao Lak.
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