PANGANDARAN, Indonesia – A tsunami crashed into beach resorts and fishing villages on Java island Monday, killing at least 306 people and leaving more than 160 missing. No warning system was in place.
Frantic tourists and villagers shouted “Tsunami! Tsunami!” as the more than 6-foot-high wave approached, some climbing trees or fleeing to higher ground to escape. Others crowded into inland mosques to pray.
Boats crashed to shore, some slamming into hotels, and houses and restaurants were flattened along a 110-mile stretch of the densely populated island’s southern coast.
“We saw a big wall of black water. I ran with my son in my arms when I looked back, the waves were at our house, they destroyed our house,” said Ita Anita, who was on the beach with her 11-month-old child and other relatives. “The water knocked me down, my son slipped out of my hands and was taken by the water.”
Anita, 20, and her husband live 30 feet from the beach in Pangandaran, a resort popular with tourists. Also on the beach were her son, mother, sister, brother, nephews. All except her mother are missing.
She said a series of large waves as tall as coconut trees came and then the water began to recede.
“When the wave receded, there was total panic. Everybody was looking for everybody,” Anita said from a hospital bed. She said she was swept inland by the wave into a rice paddy, tossed around and dragged across asphalt before she managed to climb to safety on the roof of a house.
Jan Boeken of Antwerp, Belgium, said he was sitting at a bar when his waiter started screaming.
“I looked back at the beach and saw a big wall of thundering black water coming toward us,” said the 53-year-old, who escaped with minor cuts to the head and knees. “I ran, but I got trapped in the kitchen, I couldn’t get out. I got hit in the body by debris and my lungs filled with water.”
Witnesses said the wave came several hundred yards inland in some places. The coastal area was spared by the devastating tsunami of 2004.
Regional agencies had warned that a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck 150 miles off Indonesia’s southern coast was strong enough to create a tsunami on Java, but there was no warning system for those on the southern coast.
Indonesia has installed a warning system across much of Sumatra island but not on Java. The government has been planning to extend the warning system there by 2007.
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