Local couple narrowly escape tsunami

JOEL DAVIDSON\Frontiersman reporter

MAT-SU -- A Big Lake couple was among thousands of tourists vacationing on Thailand's Phuket Island Dec. 26 when a tsunami slammed into the southern coast just before 10 a.m. and, in a moment, turned the beach from a vacation paradise into a scene of unprecedented death and carnage.

Werner Emmenegger and Marlise Alward, both 72 and of Switzerland, were waiting for a taxi near the lobby of the Safari Beach Hotel on Patong Beach at 9:50 a.m. They had stayed at the resort hotel for nearly three weeks, spending each morning lounging at the beach and strolling down the coast. It was the sixth time they had vacationing there.

"I walked that beach every morning at nine o'clock," Alward said in a phone interview last week. "I'd walk the whole beach and come back."

Dec. 26 was Emmenegger's birthday and the couple decided to go on a taxi tour that day, rather than sit at the beach as they normally did. The change of plans may have saved their lives.

"We planned a special trip," Alward said. "Otherwise we went every day to the beach."

That morning, Alward went down and told two young boys who were in charge of their beach chairs that they wouldn't be needing chairs that morning.

The taxi driver was a young Thai man. He owned his own taxi car and had taken the couple on tours of the island before. Just minutes before he was scheduled to arrive, people around the hotel began screaming and yelling.

"At first I thought it was a robbery, then I thought maybe it was terrorist," Alward said. "One lady said 'Run, it's water.' I looked and then right behind us this water was gushing."

The couple, along with hundreds of hotel guests, ran for the main flight of stairs in the lobby. As they climbed the steps, a torrent of water rushed through the first-floor lobby, bringing in beach chairs, dead fish, shattered glass, a Jet Ski and an empty shuttle bus.

"It was horrible, it was absolutely horrible," Alward said. "The water was full of objects; it wasn't just water. All that stuff probably killed the people."

Emmenegger, who is partially disabled and walks with a cane, struggled to climb the stairs with Alward.

"We were just a few feet ahead of the wave," Alward said.

Ultimately the water consumed the entire first floor, while hundreds of people crowded the second- and third-floor stairs. Others smashed a plate-glass window to climb onto the roof. Alward said she and Emmenegger were separated when the panicked crowd surged up the stairs. Alward ended up on the roof.

"We are lucky to be alive," she said. "We are still in shock; you can't describe it."

Many fellow tourists were not as fortunate.

A Scottish woman told Alward that she and her husband were sleeping in a first-floor room. When they awoke, the room was quickly filling with water. Before they could escape, the windows broke and water tore through the room.

The woman survived, but that was the last time she ever saw her husband.

"There was another guy who was sitting at the pool with his friend," Alward said. "After the wave came, he has no clue where his friend is."

Thousands of similar stories have been reported in media outlets across the globe. Government officials in Thailand reported more than 5,000 deaths, many of them tourists.

Alward and Emmenegger never again saw the young taxi driver or the two boys in charge of the beach chairs.

"If we had stayed down there, we would be gone now, too," Alward said.

Shortly after the first wave, people on the roof saw a second wave come crashing onto the coastline.

"Both waves were huge walls of water; I couldn't tell which was bigger," Alward said.

For the next hour and a half, hundreds of people remained on the stairs and hotel roof, afraid of aftershocks and more waves.

Emmenegger is a diabetic, and ultimately Alward was forced to descend the stairs to get to their first-floor room, where the medication had been left. She waded through waist-deep water and dead fish, over to the floating refrigerator. The refrigerator door was closed and the medication still inside.

After waiting hours, with no sign of any police, hotel management or authorities, Alward and Emmenegger left the hotel.

"There was so much debris in the roads and everywhere that no ambulance could come out there," Alward said. "No one had any information and there was so much rumor going on that you just had to do what you thought was best."

In the hours following the tsunamis, Alward said everyone's nerves were on edge. Occasionally, people would scream out that more water was coming, which would send everyone into a panic.

Their hotel sat on a main street along with other hotels, restaurants and stores.

"Everything on that stretch was demolished," Alward said. "Shops were completely gone. One shop owner sat crying. We knew him. He had very little and he said, 'Now I have nothing.'"

While most residents were caught unaware, several news outlets reported that Thai authorities knew of the possible tsunami but did not relay the information for fear of scaring tourists with a false alarm.

" We heard that people higher up in the government knew that there was an earthquake but people said they were so tourist-oriented that they didn't want to alarm the tourists," Alward said.

Thanks to travel insurance, Alward and Emmenegger were able to get a room that night in another hotel, farther away from the beach.

Alward said people were initially just trying to save their own lives. The next day, however, she saw many people helping one another. A British man who was staying at their new hotel helped Emmenegger get syringes for his diabetes shots.

The British man waded across the flooded street to a destroyed drugstore. He gathered supplies from the store and brought them back for people who needed them.

Alward went out the next day to try to find a pair of socks.

"All the sudden people were screaming like crazy, 'Water, water,'" Alward said.

She ran up a hill and ended up at a hospital, where she saw a U.S. soldier who told her it was a false alarm.

"He said people were just panicking and it would be like that for a while," she said.

At the hospital, Alward saw a long row of pictures of people who were missing.

"On our beach there were 800 people that perished," Alward said, "Kids had gashes in their legs. A German man was all bashed up. Something happens to you in a moment like that."

On Dec. 28, Alward and Emmenegger were able to catch a flight out to Taiwan and then to Anchorage.

"I must say, when the taxi took us to the airport, everyone was asking if we were coming back," Alward said. "They were super-nice people. They always had a smile on their face."

When they arrived in Anchorage, Alward said they were dirty and wearing sandals.

"We looked like refugees," she said. "Our nerves are still settling down but we'll be OK. We didn't suffer that much compared to the suffering that's going on there. We were not injured at all."

Alward said she doesn't know if they will ever be able to go back to Phuket Island.

"Everyone calls us mama and papa there," she said. "They remember us and we remember them. We were very sad. We couldn't stick around with so many dead bodies."

Contact Joel Davidson at joel.davidson@frontiersman.com.