Replaying the Horror of Tsunami

As the first of three giant waves engulfed him, Julian Kempa thought only one thing: Hold on to your son.

The first wave threw Kempa into an iron pump, ripping the skin off his ribs, but his grip on 3-year-old Nigel did not loosen.

The second wave pitched Kempa into a mangrove, but he held on still.

Then the third wave, the biggest and hardest, flung him into the trunk of a palm tree, and this time little Nigel slipped away.

“I let go of my son,” Kempa said, burying his head in his hands at a hospital here.

A week after this 18-mile stretch of palm huts and dugout canoes was wiped away by a tsunami, rescue teams have not found Nigel’s body. Nor do they expect to. Like hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the victims of the July 17 wave, he may have been swept out to sea. Or he may have been buried in one of the hundreds of shallow graves dug by local volunteers to ward off disease.

On Friday, rescue workers sealed off the area around Sissano Lagoon, deciding the danger of plagues borne by decomposing bodies outweighed the need to recover them.

“These people have lost everything, and they cannot mourn their dead,” said Brother James Coucher, a Roman Catholic missionary here.

In the past few days, survivors have begun to gather on the beaches and wail over their lost loved ones. Others, like Julian Kempa, have been replaying the crucial scenes in their minds again and again, repeating them to each other and to themselves, listening quietly as their friends and family do the same.

Kempa, 38, a government clerk, was relaxing in his home in the seaside village of Nimas the evening the ground began to rumble and his furniture began to shake.

Horst Letz, a seismologist in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, said the first, more powerful quake struck about 10 miles off Sissano Lagoon around 6:45 last Friday, just before sunset. The second came two hours later.

Kempa and other locals said that although they had felt many quakes before, they could not remember one as powerful as the initial quake.

“My house was about to fall,” said Nick Mengkai, a teacher who lives in the village of Warapu. Mengkai grabbed his four children and led them outside.

Kempa thought of his son, Nigel, and ran to the beach where the boy was swimming. The tremor, Kempa said, lasted about 15 seconds. “I got Nigel out of the water,” he said.

Only twice this century, according to Letz, had New Guinea’s northern coast been jolted by quakes as big as those that struck July 17: In 1907 and 1935. The latter produced a tsunami.

With the island of New Guinea perched between two continental plates, such quakes, while unpredictable, are probably inevitable. “This is where the action is,” Letz said.

About five minutes after the first quake’s tremors eased, villagers said, a howling sound began to spread, lasting several minutes. People recalled thinking it was a jet, a big engine, maybe a thunderstorm.

Abel Mokul, of the village of Masiam, was so certain it was a jet that he ran to the beach to catch a glimpse. “We thought it was a big, big plane,” Mokul said.

Martin Rokime had an inkling. When he felt the tremors and heard the awful noise, he thought of a biblical phrase about the oceans rising. “God is punishing us for our sins,” he told his family.

When Kempa’s son Nigel came out of the water amid the deafening noise, Kempa took him by the hand and looked up. Ahead of him was a black wall of water three stories high. At his feet, the water began to race away--a phenomenon typical in the seconds before a tsunami.

“The water was boiling,” Kempa said.

He and Nigel turned to run.

By now, darkness had set in and people in the villages had begun to panic.

“Everyone had gathered together,” said Mengkai, the teacher. “We knew something would come out of the sea.”

Dakawe Joachim was shopping for food a few miles away as he watched the wave unfold on his village, Arop. He was safe, but too far away to do anything for his family. “My house was right on the the beach,” Joachim said.

As she watched the wave barrel toward her, Ruth Kempa, Julian’s wife, told two of the couple’s other sons--Mesa and Ben--to run as fast as they could. “Think about Jesus,” she told them.

The wave caught them anyway.

As with her husband, Ruth Kempa found herself unable to save one of their sons. After the first wave shoved the three of them 50 yards inland, Ruth and her two sons managed to get hold of the side of a floating house. She held on to both of them, but the third and biggest wave in the tsunami carried away Ben, her 9-year-old.

“I couldn’t see him in the dark,” Ruth Kempa said, “but I heard him calling ‘Mommy, Mommy.’ ”

The Kempas’ 10-year-old son, Mesa, survived.

Up and down the coast here, parents tell similar tales of desperate, doomed attempts to save their children.

Mengkai, the schoolteacher from Warapu, said he held on to his 3-year-old son, Jessie, amid a torrent of water, smashed houses and fallen trees. But as the current rushed forward, Jessie got stuck. “I had to let him go,” Mengkai said.

Mengkai lost two of his four sons.

Britetta Takera of Warapu let go of her 1-year-old, Lindsey, when their house collapsed around them. “I lost him in the wave,” Takera said from her hospital bed.

One of the hardest hit was Joachim, the man who had watched the waves head toward his village. When he got to Arop the next morning, he discovered that four of his five children were missing. “My house and most of my family were gone,” Joachim said.

No one knows exactly how many people died in the tsunami. Survivors, many of whom clung to branches and houses, said the waters started to recede as soon as the tide had crested. With the receding waters went many of the people. The death toll stands at 1,200, though only about a third of the area’s 10,000 people have been accounted for.

By the end of the week, decomposing bodies were still turning up--in Sissano Lagoon, on the beaches, beneath wreckage. Late this week, 36 bodies washed up on the Indonesian side of the island 10 miles west.

Rachel Webster, a radiologist who lives in Vanimo, was one of the first medical people on the scene. Hundreds of people, she said, began walking out of the mangroves, where they had ridden out the tsunami. Some were vomiting seawater and sand. Others had tried to cover their wounds with palm leaves, while some used ground coconut.

Leg injuries were more common than anything else.

“They came walking out of the jungle, and their legs were bent like bananas,” Webster said.

As the injured begin to heal, the others have begun to think about where to live. In a jungle clearing where the town of Masiam once stood, the 167 remaining residents gathered to talk about the future.

Before the tsunami, Masiam had a population of more than 1,000. Today, it is a chaos of flattened homes and toppled trees.

The topic of the meeting: where to move the village.

“We cannot go back,” said Lazarus Moluk. “The village will move together.”

The tragedy of the past week has been brightened by a few shards of hope.

On Tuesday, rescue workers combing the woods near Masiam found a 9-year-old girl, Hilda Joachim, huddled half-naked behind a tree. She had been there for four days. Her father is Dakawe Joachim, who had watched from afar as the wave smashed his town.

“I cried and cried,” Joachim said.

For Julian and Ruth Kempa, who lost two of their four sons, the news also is not all bad.

Ruth is six months pregnant. Her doctors told her this week that despite her ordeal, the baby looks OK. “The baby is kicking around just fine,” Dr. John Novette said.