The Andaman Islands were hit by the tsunami. The name sounded familiar to me, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen it. Then late this afternoon I remembered: it was a locale mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes novel A Sign of Four.
They apparently are just as remote as they were when Conan Doyle wrote about them a hundred years ago.
The only way to get there is on foot, and so the Indian civil service has sent its man walking across the island. All over the Andaman and Nicobar islands there are similar stories. Another rescue team was circling the remote Sentinel island on a boat, trying to make out whether there are survivors who need help. The boat cannot land, because the aboriginals who live on Sentinel refuse to allow any outsider on their island, and have killed Indian government officials who ventured there before. So the government team was straining their eyes from a safe distance, and shouting across to the island across the waves.[snip]
The one thing that is clear is the devastating effect of the tsunami here. One island, Trinkat, has effectively been broken in two. Low lying ground in the middle of the island is now completely submerged. Survivors who have emerged from Car Nicobar spoke of entire villages wiped out of existence, leaving not a trace behind when the waters receded.
The island was so close to the epicentre of the earthquake that there was no delay between the quake and the tsunami, such as survivors described in Sri Lanka or the south Indian mainland. The wave arrived almost immediately after the ground stopped shaking.
It's hard to believe the global village still has such places, isn't it?
Posted by Linkmeister at December 30, 2004 03:27 PM