MAREMOTO

In these last days of 2004, while everyone is waxing philosophical about the old year and making (probably) futile promises for the new year, there is a tragedy in our daily news that supercedes everything.
Southwest Asia, especially Thailand and the Maldives, is a place most Italians think of as a winter paradise. Distance wise, it is about what Mexico is to the northern US, heading due south into the equator. It is economical and there is a good infrastructure geared toward tourists. We see ads for the area all of the time. Thus for Christmas break, many Italians pack their bags and head south.
When the mammoth wave that followed the huge earthquake the day after Christmas (called a “Maremoto” in Italian) washed away thousands and flattened whole islands, we immediately saw photos of it. The TV and papers are full of eyewitness Italian accounts. Celebrities were vacationing all over the area, and all now seem to be accounted for. Not so lucky are the thousands of Italian tourists who, having escaped the wave, now wait for rescue to come from somewhere in the Italian government, since regularly scheduled planes are all cancelled. There are also stories of those lucky tourists, bringing back only the clothes they wore to the airport, who were able to take off from airport runways full of water.
Dramatic eyewitness accounts are so sad it is almost too much to read and watch them. Because of the incredible force of the water, many too weak to save themselves were lost. That means a big percentage of the dead are children, about a third. Many were swept away swimming or playing on the beach. Hospitals are full to non-functioning, and the threat of epidemics of catastrophic proportions is strong owing to the great number of unburied dead bodies lying about. Looting and the breakdown of civil law are reported in some spots.
One official said that an accurate count of the dead could not be made because so many bodies were still caught up in the branches of trees where they landed when swept away. Some ships at sea reported weathering the giant waves, and others are lost or out of communication. The number of missing grows daily as people realize they have not heard from someone vacationing in some tiny island, such as the one Leonardo Di Capra made famous in Blue Lagoon. That particular island was a thriving tourist spot, but is now no more. It is submerged and may not re-emerge. Travel agencies in Italy are reporting disastrous financial losses, and individuals report that no one will speak to them about refunds for vacations in the area that they did not take yet.
Somehow none of these material considerations seem important when you stop to really think about the vagaries of blind luck, of who was swept away and who survived. The workings of fate are illustrated in story after story. There is one which tells of the one man in a village near the epicenter who got away climbing atop corpses; another of a couple who clung to each other but lost hold of their tiny daughter; or of those on the top floors of a hotel seeing the bottom floors scoured of people and furniture when the wave hit and washed through it. What was it that determined that one should die and one should live?
And maybe this loss could have been minimized. Of course there is the cry for preventive measures. There was a headline today that stated thousands could have been saved. The technology exists in the Pacific Rim: the US and Japan have the ability to give early warnings to the public in case of this type of catastrophe based on scientific instruments. So vacationers could have been told to get to higher ground, to leave the warm noonday beaches and flee. I wonder if they all would have. I wonder how many could have been saved. And I especially wonder how those that did survive will live the rest of their lives, with the knowledge that they were somehow chosen to live while so many others died.