News Article

College employees narrowly escape Asian tsunami


1/7/2005 9:43:47 AM


Gillams native Judy Park, left, and Davida Smith, a colleague at College of the North Atlantic-Qatar, have a box lunch after being evacuated from the airport in Phuket, Thailand after the Boxing Day tsunami hit, devastating the resort they stayed at until hours before this photo was taken. This is the first stage of the evacuation, still in Phuket City. They were later transported to a school in the mountains and returned to the airport later that night.

By CLIFF WELLS
Reprinted from the Western Star


Judy Park is convinced someone’s watching over her.

The Gillams native narrowly escaped the Boxing Day tsunami that devastated Thailand, Sri Lanka and other Indian Ocean Rim countries after an earthquake off Indonesia sent the wave hurtling toward some of the most populous and poorest countries in the world.

The death toll stands at 139,488 and the UN expects the count to top 150,000 before the tally is finalized.

Park, minutes before the wave hit, left the resort she was staying at in Phuket, Thailand – one of the areas hit hardest by the horrific deluge. The tsunami struck about the time she was scheduled to leave the resort.

The admissions officer for the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar said surviving the event changed her life. Park, who was reached by The Western Star on her cell phone in Doha, Qatar, said she missed the flood by the narrowest of margins.

“We were in Phuket on the morning that it happened,” said Park. “We were scheduled to leave to go to Bangkok on the flight at 11:10 a.m. We just left the resort at 9:15 a.m. and my understanding is it struck that particular resort area at 9:30 a.m.

“We just missed it only because our limousine came 15 minutes early. We were scheduled to leave by limousine at 9:30 a.m., but the limousine came at 9:15 a.m. We left and, within 15 minutes after we left, the tidal wave somewhere in the area of 10-30 metres high struck the Laguna area.”

Park said she felt so lucky to be alive after what had happened and her narrow escape.

By the skin of our teeth, we got out of there,” she said. “We were so fortunate and so lucky. Until we got back to Bangkok and really saw what was happening, it was like, ‘Oh my God, I could be there, I could be one of these people that they¹re looking for.’ We were just so lucky.”

“...When you think of it, you think, ‘Oh, my God, how did I manage to get out of there? How come I was so lucky?’ The only thing I can think is someone was watching over me and we were just so lucky. I am not planning to travel anymore this semester,” she said, emotion welling up in her voice.

She said once the limousine left and they were safely inland, the frightening ordeal was just beginning.

“We were at the airport. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 11:10 a.m. and we hadn’t boarded at 11 a.m. We noticed that people who worked at the airport were closing up their shops. All of a sudden, a lady from Thai Airways came in and said, ‘Run, run, everyone run.’ We got quite a scare and we ran out of the airport not knowing what was happening – my first thought was a terrorist attack.”

She said the group was moved to a nearby town and eventually to a mountain school where they stayed until about 8:30 p.m. Then they were bused back to the airport for the flight to Bangkok.

“All this time, we didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “We knew people were getting calls on international mobiles. The news was there was a earthquake in Indonesia, then we were getting different stories from the other travellers, but we really didn’t know what happened until we got back to Bangkok in the hotel and turned on the news. Then we saw all the devastation and what had happened where we were.

“We spent Boxing night watching it on the news and getting over the shock of what really happened. We were there. We couldn’t really understand what had happened. ... we knew it was a tidal wave, we didn’t know it was a tsunami. We didn’t know about the destruction or that it had happened where we were. We didn’t know any of this until we got back into Bangkok.”

Park said she called her parents, Sam and Catherine in Gillams, to tell them she was OK.

“My first though was, ‘Oh my God, my parents are going to see this on the news.’ So I called them and said, ‘You’re going to hear this on the news. I’m OK. I’m in Bangkok.”

She said the Chedi Resort in Laguna, Thailand, near Phuket, was so nice, she wanted to stay an extra night, but she’s glad she didn’t.

“I was saying to Davida, the other lady that was travelling with me, I said only for trying to cancel and have new flights going back to Bangkok, I’d love to stay for another night. It wasn’t meant to be or somebody was watching over us or something because I wanted to stay the extra night.”

She said there were things she took as signs that something was up, although she only took notice of them after the fact.

“The undertow in the water was really strong and that morning, around 7 a.m.
or so, we heard a shaking and a loud noise,” she said. “Davida said that’s an awful loud plane and I said that’s not a plane, that’s the ocean. Now that I think of it, they could have been little signs something was happening.”

Jennifer Sheppard, manager of marketing and public relations for the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar, was also in Thailand when the tidal wave hit.

“We were in the north of Thailand, so we didn’t see any of the destruction.
We were in Chiang Mai and then we moved down to Bangkok and we didn’t see any destruction there, either,” she said. “We felt the aftershocks in the morning, but we didn’t see any actual destruction.”

She said she didn’t know she felt aftershocks until later.

“It woke us up early in the morning, but we didn’t know what it was,” she said. “I was sound asleep and I thought, ‘Maybe I was dreaming’, and I went back to sleep.”

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