Temple becomes a morgue

By Rafael D. Frankel

TAKUA PA, Thailand—On the last day of the year at Watt Yan Yao, the Buddhist temple-turned-mortuary, the bodies just kept coming.

While forensics teams from Thailand, Australia and Holland begun the work to identify badly decomposed remains, the 1,600 corpses lined in rows in nearly every corner of the Watt on Thursday were joined by 2,000 more on Friday, bringing the total number of dead from near-by Khao Lak Beach alone to greater than those killed in the September 11 attacks in the United States.

With the Andaman Sea still disgorging bodies five days after the tsunamis struck, the death toll—though smaller than in the other hard hit countries—continued to climb higher than anyone here originally thought possible: 5,043 dead, 10,459 injured, with 6,479 still missing.

The ever-increasing toll the tidal waves wrecked upon Thailand did not leave many in the mood to celebrate the new year here.

While some five-star resorts went ahead with slightly scaled back versions of their previously scheduled gala dinners, most of the celebrations in the south, and indeed across Thailand, were cancelled.

A candle light vigil was held in Phuket Town Hall, which is serving as the disaster relief center here, to mark 2005. In Bangkok, and in towns across the northern regions of the country, many people wore black.

Supone Sengsahus, 43, a taxi driver in Phuket, said he was taking his family to a Buddhist temple “to make merit for the Thai and foreigners” who died the day after Christmas.

In a reversal from what Thai officials said for the first five days since the disaster, when they claimed the vast majority of those killed were locals, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Friday that at least 2,230 of the dead were foreigners. Most of them were Europeans taking a tropical Christmas vacation.

“The fact is that the hardest hit areas were frequented by foreigners,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Sihasak Phuangketkeow said. “The whole country feels sorry for everyone that died, Thai and foreigner both.”

With the magnitude of the tsunami now sinking in, officials and aid workers from foreign governments were arriving by the dozens from many of at least 35 countries which had nationals killed and injured here.

Sweden, which now believes it may have lost from 2,000 to 3,500 people in the tidal waves, had teams from its Foreign Affairs Ministry inspecting Watt Yan Yao Friday trying to arrange the logistics for hundreds, if not thousands, of relatives expected to make the trip here to try to find missing family members.

The Swedish government has come under blistering criticism at home by many who felt its reaction to the tragedy was callously sluggish.

“I agree, we were too slow,” said Nina Brungstedt, a member of Sweden’s inspection team. “The whole country is in mourning. Everybody lost someone or knows of someone that is missing.”

While the United States was also criticized for acting slowly and being stingy with its aid in the aftermath of the disaster, its relief contributions began Friday with supply runs to the stricken areas on Friday by C-130 aircraft.

Those runs were just the first salvo in what was to be an “enormous and continuous” relief effort by the American military, a U.S. embassy spokesman said.

Two hours east of Bangkok, the Utapao Airbase, which the United States used for bombing runs during the Vietnam War, was transforming into the coordinating center for the U.S. relief effort in South Asia, the spokesman said. An entire carrier fleet, forensics teams, and other relief specialists were expected shortly.

Meanwhile, the Watt in this small Thai village—where the smell of decomposing bodies inundates even the local 7-11s—saw its front lawn usurped by a make-shift mortuary of cargo holds. It is one of the three special morgues being built in Thailand to house the bodies of the dead where Thai and foreign forensics teams began sifting through the thousands of corpses in an effort to determine which bodies were locals and which were not.

Though Foreign Ministry Spokesman Sihasak said the bodies would be given the same treatment regardless of nationality, at Watt Yan Yao, foreign bodies were being stored in the recently installed air-conditioned cargo holds while Thai bodies were being bagged with a block of dry ice set on top of them until more holds arrived.

After five days of decomposition, the identification process was often slow. And with the dead continuing to be brought in by the truck load, Peter Knox, a senior constable who is leading the Australian forensics team here, said they “had no idea when they would be finished.”

“The scale is absolutely massive,” Knox said, his team having been deployed to Bali after the Oct. 2002 bombings there which killed 202 people.

After separating the bodies, the forensics teams will begin taking skin samples to create a DNA database of all the dead here, a Dutch forensic team member who wished his name withheld said. People with missing family members could then have their DNA checked against the samples on file to determine if one of the bodies was a relative.

Until some identification is made and the families decide what to do with them, the bodies will remain at Watt Yan Yao and the other morgues.

© 2005 Rafael D. Frankel and The Chicago Tribune