After the Waves: The News Articles, Part 1
The Newark Star-Ledger, December 29, 2004.
Present Day, May 5, 2022.
I am writing this on my second to last day on the Cape. I left Provincetown yesterday and am now in Brewster until tomorrow. It seemed to make sense to drop in some back story early on about my story, and I thought this article that was published on one of the major NJ papers might add some context at the outset. There are a couple of footnotes that I added to my old post below:
* I’ll also post this article shortly.
** I’ll get to them shortly, too.
These references pertain to other old posts (and additional parts of the story) that were published on my old Wordpress site, “After the Waves”, that I’ve not yet written about here. I will get there, but like I said above, a little more context about the disaster itself might be helpful now.
This content below was posted to “After the Waves” on April 28, 2009.
Surviving the Waves: The Star-Ledger Article.
A while ago I wrote about and posted the article* that was printed in my local paper, The Hoboken Reporter, and said that I would at some point post the article that was printed in the Newark Star-Ledger and the Jersey Journal, fairly major NY metro newspapers (at the time at least, they have since been fighting bankruptcy as many papers are these days).
Below is the article that was printed on December 29, 2004. To be honest, I don’t remember how the papers found us. Probably from our friends back in New York. Both of us were working in the media at the time.
I wasn’t too keen on talking at first. That may be obvious, as it has taken me four years to start telling the story. But looking back, talking to people from home, reporters or not, must have been us feeling closer to home.
And just for the record, all of the reporters we spoke to, when still in Thailand, or when we got home, were all very respectful of what we had been through, at least I thought so at the time. But then again, I would have clung to anyone from NY or NJ at that point. The article also touches upon part of the Dean and Deborah** part of the story, which I have yet to finish, but haven’t forgotten about.
The shout from lobby was no joke: ‘Tidal wave!’
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
BY BRIAN DONOHUE Star-Ledger Staff
It started as another day in paradise. As friends Kim Selby and Usheen Davar sat eating breakfast at a beachside cafe in Phuket, Thailand, they saw the ocean turn a strange color, from crystal blue to brownish. Weird, they thought.
The water hadn’t changed color. It was rearing back, exposing the ocean bottom.
Minutes later, the two women, were clambering to the hotel rooftop as the sea surged forth into the lobby and through the streets of Phuket.
Speaking by telephone from a Bangkok hotel room yesterday, Selby and Davar recalled their narrow escape from the tsunami that has left tens of thousands dead across South Asia.
“I’m shaking as I talk to you,” Davar said, more than 48 hours later.
For Selby, and Davar, two vacationing Manhattan professionals born in New Jersey, it had been their third day on Patong Beach, one of several beaches on this island off Thailand’s southern coast that had become a mecca for sun-seeking tourists, mostly from Europe and Australia.
Davar, a Metuchen native living in Manhattan, started the day checking her e-mail in the lobby of the Bann Laimai hotel. She noticed an Internet news item about an earthquake in Indonesia. Only then did she realize the slight rumbling that had awoken her an hour earlier was not a dream.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she told Selby, a Cherry Hill native now living in Hoboken. “There was an earthquake here last night.”
The women dismissed the temblor as a minor curiosity, then moved to the beachfront buffet.
Returning after breakfast to their second-floor hotel room to retrieve their bags, they heard a man running through the lobby screaming, “Tidal wave!”
Selby thought it was a bad joke. Then she saw the water — ankle-deep at first, rushing into the bottom floor of the hotel; then, deeper, darker, pushing branches and bricks.
People rushed into the hotel from the street: an elderly couple struggling to walk, a man with a look of horror on his face as he cradled an infant, people “bleeding all over.”
They climbed the stairs to the roof of the hotel, where a group had already gathered. They watched the streets turn into a fetid rapids carrying cars, bodies and telephone poles.
“People being washed into the sea, vehicles flying, blood everywhere,” Davar later wrote in e-mail to friends.
Perched on the roof, Davar borrowed another woman’s cell phone, called her sister and said goodbye.
“I left the message you never want to leave someone in your life,” she said.
The water receded once, a giant tease. Then it slowly rose again, filling the hotel and streets a second time.
For two hours, the group huddled on the roof, trading rumors and conflicting advice.
If they stayed on the roof, another wave could come and sweep them away. If they fled, they could be killed before reaching higher ground.
“We went through this whole decision-making process,” Selby said. “Do we go? Do we stay? We just said, look, we have to rely on our instincts and get the hell out of here now.”
First downstairs to their hotel room, grabbing bottles of water from the wet bar, a bag of chips and some bedsheets. Then out into the flooded streets, wading in their flip-flops through the town’s maze of alleyways, scaling brick walls until the two women reached the Montana Grand Hotel, a 17-story high-rise about two blocks farther inland.
They met an Australian man and his niece from Argentina, who let them stay in their room. The Australian used his cell phone to send a text message to a friend in Sydney, who called the friend’s father to let him know the women were safe.
Even at the Montana Grand, people were fearful.
“I started to panic and said, ‘This was the wrong decision — we should have gone to the hills,'” Davar said, referring to the slopes rising just outside the town. “That was the longest night of our lives.”
They passed the night on the floor, their passports tucked in their shirts, ready to flee. At first light, they caught a cab to Phuket International Airport and a flight to Bangkok.
Selby and Davar were among thousands of Western tourists who had packed the beachfront resort. Authorities struggled yesterday to identify bodies as tourists gathered at city hall to wait for news about missing loved ones. At local hospitals, people pored over lists of injured and looked at photos of unidentified bodies.
Selby is trying to catch a flight home Saturday. Her friend is headed to Karachi, Pakistan, where her family is vacationing.
“We were so extraordinarily lucky,” Selby said. “The people from our hotel — a lot of them aren’t alive.”
Note: Because the story is pretty old at this point, there is no URL available to link to the source material at the Star-Ledger website. The story was written by Brian Donohue, and I offer a credit to him by linking to his Twitter profile here.
© 2022 Kim Selby, All rights reserved. All photography © Kim Selby unless otherwise credited.