Heart-rending scene still haunts me 20 years later

ST photojournalist returns to Banda Aceh two decades after seeing the aftermath of the destruction firsthand

- Desmond Foo

The sickening smell hit me hard, even though I had been warned about it when I was assigned to cover the devastation in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, as a photojournalist a week after the tsunami hit on Dec 26, 2004.

The reek of decaying bodies was impossible to ignore, and just as impossible to get used to. The scarf covering my nose was heavily smeared with Vicks VapoRub medicated ointment, but that did not help much to disguise the odour of death as I approached the city centre. Most residents used whatever they could lay their hands on, including coffee powder, to smear on their noses to mask the smell.

The streets of the city centre were littered with fishing boats, warped vehicles, mattresses, wooden furniture, personal belongings, and bodies stacked in huge piles up to 5m high. It looked like a scene from a blockbuster disaster movie. But this was for real.

From the heavy stench, I immediately knew that many more bodies lay underneath the city's ruins, yet to be recovered. Thousands of lives were claimed by the giant waves in just minutes.

With only a few excavators and little heavy equipment available, most of the recovery work, including the retrieval of bodies, was carried out by hand.

The most horrifying scene I encountered was underneath the Peunayong Bridge where many boats were smashed up among the endless debris. In the midst of this, dozens of corpses lay in plain sight, blackened from rot and unrecognisable, like badly charred mannequins.