Manoa doctor to stay and help victims
By Eloise Aguiar
Advertiser Staff Writer
A Hawai'i doctor who survived the Asian tsunami has decided to stay in the area to help.
Dr. Daniel Susott, of Manoa, said he and others were diving off a southern Thai island when the tsunami hit and they had to battle strong currents. They scrambled for their boat, but two divers were carried to the other side of the island, he said.
Susott
"As soon as we picked them up from the other side of the small island, the ocean surged violently in the opposite direction, threatening to suck our boat into the vortex," Susott wrote in an e-mail. "We had no idea what was going on. Gradually we made it back to the beach. An hour after we had left the beach, the big wave had struck and wiped everything out.
"We were lucky. We survived. Thousands more did not."
Susott said he is now in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he went after learning about the magnitude of suffering there.
Christianna Savino and her boyfriend, Jake Duhart, who both attended the University of Hawai'i, are teachers in Thailand and rock-climb as a hobby, said they were hanging from a cliff 40 feet above the sea when the tsunami appeared and screaming people started running.
Now in Bangkok, the couple had traveled to Krabi to rock-climb at Railey Beach, about 25 miles by boat from Phuket, one of the hardest hit areas in Thailand.
Quick action by the climbing instructor brought Duhart to the ground when people started yelling "tidal wave," said Duhart in an e-mail.
"As we were scrambling, there were a lot of panicking people," he said. "I turned toward the ocean and encountered a wave of about eight to 12 feet coming to shore. It had no rip or curl to it. It was just a massive wall of white water coming to shore."
Savino said if they had waited seconds longer to come down and run, they would have been crushed against the rock wall.
People were given life jackets and told to rush along the trail to the top of the rock, she said.
The water was a huge mass of white foam, Savino said.
"It rose quickly and steadily but it wasn't as frightening as the huge boulders it was rolling towards us," she said. "The screams of the people made my heart race but not until I saw the bloody and gashed up limbs and faces did I realize how serious it was."
The wave covered hundreds of feet within seconds, they said.
Duhart said a woman looking for her child was swept out to sea at Railey Beach and a man died of a heart attack.
A second wave kept people on the rock waiting for rescue. The injured and sick were removed first and the couple waited about four hours for their turn. They returned to devastated beachfront shops, chaos at the hospital, taxi boats broken in half, the constant sounds of helicopters and sirens, and huge crowds waiting for rescue boats, Savino said.
"Everywhere you go there is silence of mourning," she said. "There are missing signs of people posted around town."
Dr. Susott is staying in Sri Lanka to help with relief. He is the medical director of Airline Ambassadors International, which will fly aid to the affected countries. At first he thought he might be helping the injured but he said in a phone interview that money is what people need most.
The nations will need long-term aid to rebuild homes, orphanages and other structures, he said.
"You don't have a lot of walking wounded," he said. "What you have is the dead and the survivors who are reasonably well.
"There also is going to be a huge need for trauma counseling, psychological counseling."
