Year-old resort gone in 'minutes'

By Rafael D. Frankel

BAN LA-ON, Thailand, Dec. 29—The sushi bar was collapsed, decorative stone elephants were sunk at the bottom of a world-record size pool, the bottom two floors of rooms were overflowing with shattered glass and assorted debris, the spa was ripped from its foundations, and the beach-side restaurant had simply disappeared into the sea.

But the priority yesterday for disaster workers and surviving staff of the five-star Sofitel Magic Lagoon Resort and Spa on Khao Lak beach was the grim task of finding, bagging, and removing the rotting corpses which were buried beneath rubble and palm fronds, trapped inside bedrooms they never made it out of, or flayed and rotting in the driveway leading up to the colonnaded lobby.

On the second day after massive tidal waves struck Thailand’s Southwestern coast, the true scale of the disaster was beginning to emerge. Similar gruesome scenes were being played out all over Khao Lak beach, a wide stretch of white sand which was formerly home to dozens of secluded, upscale resorts and which is now a ten-kilometer-long disaster area.

At least two Buddhist temples in the towns lining the beach were turned into temporary mortuaries, where the bodies of Thais and foreigners alike were awaiting identification by their families.

It was in Phang Nga province, where Khao Lak is located, that more than half of the now 1,516 reported deaths and 8,432 injuries in Thailand occurred, according to figures provided by the foreign affairs ministry. Khao Lak alone has seen around 300 bodies wash ashore in the last two days, according to the Thai national guard.

At the Sofitel, surviving staff picked through the wreckage of the once posh resort while tearful mothers and sisters of missing Thai staff brought blown-up pictures of their relatives to the washed out grounds, trying to gain any knowledge of their fate.

On what was the tennis and volley ball courts next to the front lobby, a Thai policeman showed foreigners who walked by passports belonging to the dead hotel guests. One passport belonged to a 10-year-old French girl wrapped in a bloodied sheet laying next to his truck with 12 other bodies.

In front of a golf cart which had become lodged in a fountain in the driveway, the architect of the one-year-old resort sat chain smoking cigarettes with some of the staff. “We worked eight months on this, two shifts per day, 3,000 workers, spending [$75,000 to $100,000] per day and it is all gone in five minutes,” Ekasak Thongthasawes said.

“We are totally lost. We lost staff we had worked with for so long. I believe this is worse than 9/11,” he said.

Touring the Sofitel site, Phang Nga Provincial Governor Anuwut Medhiwiboonwut said authorities had not found any survivors among the thousands still missing today, and only a few yesterday. “It’s very sad. So many people dead, and now what will the people here do for income?” he said.

While 300 people are believed to have been killed at the Sofitel alone, the visual devastation was tame in comparison to the main stretch of Khao Lak beach. There, the tidal waves completely destroyed entire structures, either leaving them collapsed on the beach or dragging their remains out to see.

Scores of bodies, parched and bloated from floating in the sea for more than 48 hours, were washing up onto shore throughout the day. The smell from the rotting flesh wafted in the air for hundreds of meters across the beach and up into the surrounding hills despite a breeze off the Andaman Sea.

Thai National Guard Captain Yirasap Sangee, who lead a detail yesterday on the beach, said most of the corpses they recovered were foreigners. Standing next to the ocean on a cloudless afternoon in front of the decimated Kaho Lak Beach Resort, he said they had been working non-stop for the last two days but that he thought the worst of it had passed.

That has yet to be seen, however, as the number of those missing is still in the thousands. Sweden alone may be missing as many as 1,500 people, according to Thorleif Hawi, who lives in Phuket and was volunteering at a station set up by the Swedish consulate at the make-shift disaster center in the Phuket Town Hall.

Despite the high foreign death toll, Thai officials said the majority of those killed here were locals.

At Watt Lak Kan, a local Buddhist temple, 42 bodies lay wrapped in sheets, some with limbs protruding, in the morning sun. By evening, that number had neared 100 as Buddhist religious workers brought more in throughout the day from the adjacent beach.

Coffins were stacked along side the corpses, but were used only when family members successfully identified a dead relative. One Japanese family took their son away at the same time as a dead Swedish woman was laid next to the rest of the corpses at the temple.

“It is not true that [the bodies] will be cremated,” Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai said yesterday, seeking to allay rumors that had spread here among foreign tourists. “The difficulty now is to identify the nationality of those who died, to identify whether they are Thais or foreigners, or if they are foreigners which country they are from.”

While some foreigners came to the temple to search for loved ones, hundreds of Thais pulled the sheets from the faces of the bodies looking for family members. Many of the locals sat under the shade of papaya trees waiting for more bodies to be delivered.

“Everyone here is sad and worried,” said Wichai, a tour guide from Phuket who only gave his first name. “They came from all over the country looking for their family and they haven’t found them.”

On Highway 4, which runs along the sea in Phang Nga, the tidal waves wrecked devastation as far as a kilometer inland. The ground floors of many buildings along the road were completely gutted while the second and third floors remained spotless.

A Thai Navy frigate was marooned in the jungle about 700 meters in from the sea while a bus which overturned killing 30 people remained mired in a four-meter deep lagoon. Rows of bodies lined the roads every few kilometers.

The first international aid arrived in Thailand yesterday, including rescue workers from Taiwan, and firefighters and paramedics from Germany. The United States would be sending C-105 reconnaissance planes with special technology to locate people stranded at sea, Foreign Minister Surakiart said.

© 2004 Rafael D. Frankel and The Chicago Tribune