The Story of Survival at Koh Surin from the Killer Tsunami

A few years ago, I happen to have the pleasure to visit one of the world's most famed shallow water coral reef at Koh Surin. If you haven't heard about it, Koh Surin is a name that is used to refer to a small chain of island a few hours of transit by boat off the coast of Phang Na - which houses one of the world's most famous snorkeling destination. During my 4 day stay there, I had a great time of snorkeling around different places around the island chain, seeing massive amounts of coral reef, local fishes, turtles, and on some occurrences some other strange marine animals (such as sharks!). Other than the unspoilt scenery, marine life, another tourist attraction there was that there was a village of natives called the Morgan tribe that lived in one of the islands off the island chain. During our time there, we were asked if we wanted to visit their island. As I and our crew didn't want to disturb the local populace by inpolitely staring at their primative and mudane lifestyle, we decided to decline the invitation and spend most of our effort on touring the island.

Forwarding a few years into the present, as you may have heard, a huge earthquake off the coast of Indonesia has triggered killer Tsunami waves. An illustration below shows the area affected by the Tsunami wave, and as you can notice, the whole coast of the western seaboard of Thailand was affected - including Koh Surin.



If you noticed, Japan is a world leader in Earthquake detection and prevention as their country is earthquake prone. During the earthquake at Indonesia, their country has been informing countries in South Western Asia to evacuate the citizens from the coastal area as soon as possible. The Tsunami waves requires a few hours to reach those destinations. In some areas with bad infrastructure such as Sri Lanka, India and some other countries in South Asia, it would have been close to impossible to evacuate. However in tourist areas such as Phuket in Thailand, where there is high IT and infrastructure penetration (our PM used to toy with the idea of Tourist and IT City), the evacuation of popular tourist sites in Thailand could have been done early to minimizes loses. However as Thailand - known more for their remedy instead of prevention, decided to sit back on its seat, saying that the fears were unfound. No evacuation was called, and within a few hours, hell froze over. One of the worst natural disaters that happened to our beautiful country happened because of the complentency of our agencies that place a higher emphasis on the green back of the tourist industry than the value fo the lifes of the individual people.

Meanwhile just a few hours before the killer Tsunami hit the island of Koh Surin, the water has subsided to a awfully strange low level. During this time the majority of ignorant tourists finding the strange phenomenon intriguing decided to walk upon the sea bed looking at the coral reef like it was a garden. Unknown to most of the people there, that the beautiful colors of the reef had an eerie ring to it.

However just accross the island at the Morgan tribe, the local tribes people when seeing the water subsided to a strange low level, quickly evacuated its village up to the top of the island. They have consistently passed tales from their ancestors down and one of them told them - "If the water rescides to a low level in the ocean, a huge calamity will happen. Head straight to the highest peaks". So with that folklore, the whole village along with most of the tourists visiting has quickly climbed the highest peak of the island.

Within a few hours, it was all over. The Tsunami Island hit the whole chain of Koh Surin, killing and injring a huge majority of tourists. The people who escaped rather unscathed were the Morgan tribe and the visitors that were lucky to be there at the right place and time.

It is painful, but this provides a great reminder of one of the greatest paradoxes about the advancement of our society. As our society becomes more advanced, we have hugely forgotten about our ancient forelore and knowledge, that we then to discard and take lightly - like the primative natives off the Morgan tribe. However in this instance, we can see that the knowledge handed from generations before through forelore has been more authorative than many of the agencies and authorities here. Where as the government has tried to completely uproot their way of life, in this sad episode, it has given me a lot of appreciation for their way of life.

After the episode unravels today, with the Government suddenly in full PR gear and suddenly talking about putting up a Tsunami alert net at no cost bound, I would never forget the failure of our authority in protecting our citizens - much like how they treated our people with contempt as in the Avian Flu epidermic. This utter comtempt for human life is masked by the glitzy PR work done at this moment - in which at the conclusion of this, I will trust the native tribes with their simple way of life more than pretty words of influential people.

For the rest of us, I would like to congratulate us for our unselfishness. The donations of the individual citizens from all around our country and around the world is going to make the difference. I do want to remind that there is still alot to do, and many in the far flung areas have yet to receive much aid.

Based on this, I do want to point out some obscure facts that should turn out heads regarding this event. I want our readers to have the chance to visit and read through the following blog:
Asian Tsunami Blog.

I'll like to show some interesting excerpts:

Australia has pledged $35 million despite spending close to a $1 billion on the Iraq war so far. In contrast to this the ordinary people of Victoria had pledged almost as much as the British Government in one day.

The aid that US has pleged the Asian countries were a paltry $35 million dollars, which is the amount US spends in 3 and a half hour in the occupation of Iraq to protect the oiling industry.

With such figures, it is only natural to have a heavy heart...