1
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/VVOS-7WHLN2?OpenDocument&rc=5&emid=TS-2009-000209-ASM
American Samoa's tsunami 'like Hurricane Katrina':
rescuer
Source: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Date: 04 Oct 2009
PAGO PAGO, American Samoa, Oct 3, 2009 (AFP) - The deadly tsunami that crashed
into American Samoa last week produced scenes as calamitous as those of Hurricane
Katrina, a US rescuer who has witnessed both disasters said Saturday.
Ferocious waves were unleashed by a 8.0 magnitude undersea quake which rattled the
region early Tuesday, leaving as many as 180 people dead in American Samoa,
neighbouring Samoa and the Pacific island nation Tonga.
"We were deployed to (Hurricane) Katrina, and in terms of destruction it's very similar, I
don't think you can prepare for it," United States rescue worker Judy Bartzatt told AFP,
referring to the storm that smashed into the southern US coast in 2005.
"The water must have come with unimaginable force. The power and the suddenness of it,
some people had just moments to run."
In the capital Pago Pago, residents saw the deep harbour, long assumed to be one of the
safest in the Pacific, all but empty after the quake hit.
Lewis Malala scrambled to the roof of the two-storey Pago Plaza as five waves smashed
into the city, throwing shipping containers, cars and boats through churches and homes.
Malala said he saw people swept from the restaurant below to their deaths.
"Lucky it was early, there were little (few) people, many still at home," he said. "Half an
hour later, people waiting for the bus to school, driving to work, there would have been
many more bodies."
Schoolchildren account for many of the dead from a handful of devastated villages on
American Samoa's west coast, where the tsunami hit as they walked home from school
after the earthquake, said Alega village resident Candy Mann.
"My wife's cousin was walking to meet the kids and she was walking across the bridge and
had just got hold of her daughter and that's when the tsunami hit and snapped that bridge
off," Mann said.
"She was seven years old. Found the following day still with her backpack on and still with
her school uniform on, buried under the bridge in the mangroves."
