The forces of nature and humanity

A year on from the tsunami there are some images burned into my mind. Images of death and horror on an industrial scale, mass graves, blank eyed children and a smell of rotting flesh which you can actually feel on your body. It was an event which was unparalleled in recent history and something any of us who were near any of the countries affected will never forget.

It happened on St Stephen's Day, and I have to admit I didn't even hear about it until the next day – news bulletins are not part of my Christmas. But as the horror and the sheer scale of the thing began to reveal itself over the next day or two, I was mentally preparing myself for going. By New Year's Day, I was on the way to Banda Aceh, where probably 100,000 people died.

Flying in, the first thing you saw was that even the television pictures couldn't prepare you for the extent of the devastation. The destruction went on mile after mile after mile. Only an atomic bomb could have caused as much damage, and the city of Aceh indeed looked as if it had been twinned with Hiroshima. From the air you could see that where the wave hit there was nothing left except rubble, broken wood and mud. In some parts it stretched for a couple of miles inland and even the sea itself was changed. Huge areas were brown from the soil that the retreating waters had dragged in with them.

The airport itself wasn't affected by the wave, but on the road into the city the horror began to reveal itself. A huge mass grave had been prepared on the roadside and dumper trucks full of bodies were pulling up to it. The painstaking identification process they were going through in Thailand had no place at all here – the numbers of dead were just too huge. Everywhere volunteer workers who had flown in from all over Indonesia were pulling bodies from the rubble, wrapping them in black plastic and leaving them by the roadside for collection. Such was the size of the task that there was no room at all for sentiment. But still, the sight of huge dumper trucks – the type normally used to move soil or building materials – driving along the roads carrying hundreds of bodies was something most of us will never get out of our minds.

But amid the horror, what was uplifting was the organisation and ability shown by the Indonesians themselves in dealing with the aftermath. Thousands of volunteers, most of them university students, were flown in from all over the country to help. These were the very young men and women who carried out the terrible task of removing the dead from the rubble. They were given black overalls and face masks and housed in huge tents for as long as they were willing to stay.

I spoke to many of them and found them to be some of the most impressive people I had ever met. They were motivated by a mixture of patriotism and charity, and the only thing they hoped for was that they would be able to forget the terrible things they had witnessed when they eventually got back home. Later on in the year when I witnessed the level of disorganisation in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it really drove home to me how good the initial response to the tsunami had been.

Something else which surprised me was the lack of anger among people over what had happened. I asked people who had lost everything – their homes, their families, their neighbours – if there could be any reason for what happened. They just smiled and said of course not, it was just a force of nature and no one could have done anything about it. In Banda Aceh an early warning system would have had little and probably no affect. The water was travelling so fast when it hit that in many places all that was left of houses were the tiles on the floor – everything else had been swept away. It hit within minutes of the earthquake and even if there had been a warning, very few people would have been able to get out of the way in time.

I could only conclude afterwards that the stoicism with which people accepted what had happened was probably because there was no one to blame. A year on though, progress in getting people back to normal has been slow, and you can only imagine that the absence of anger in people is now a thing of the past.