Blogs, wikis and photoblogs are offering a first-hand glimpse into the devastation that followed the tsunamis that struck south-east Asia on Saturday. Bloggers and wikis are also coming together to build clearinghouses of information to help victims get aid and find each other, as well as direct Internet users around the world where they can go for help.
Reports from disaster scenes are heartbreaking. One blogger on the scene writes:
Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to help people in hospitals.
It's a difficult job to comfort people who are such in shock, surely when you are not a professional on the matter. Lot of stories to account for, some with happy endings, but most of the time unhappy news.
I think it's a terrible thing to have no knowledge about a missing relative. I spent some hours with Leo, from Belgium. He is absolutly sure his wife is still alive, he swear he saw her in an hotel room close to him. But today we still have no news from her. An Irish family has also been reunited after being separated fro hours, fearing the worst for each other.
The blog adds: "A Dutch old man living in Australia, escaped from his flooded room, but sadly has to let his wife drowned in the room. They were married for 33 years."
Ceneus writes from Sri Lanka: "The dead are being buried with extreme haste and little ceremony. Apparently the people who are burying them are trying to make a note of where the graves are and if they find a passport they are taking a note of that too, in the hope that perhaps one day those remains might be returned to their home countries."
Much of the most compelling converage comes from Sanjay/Morquendi, a blogger and TV producer who lives and works in Sri Lanka, one of the areas hardest hit by the disaster. He sent updates to a blog via cell phone text messaging, frequently circumventing censorship efforts by the Sri Lankan police, known as the Tamil Tigers. Boing Boing excerpted one of Sanjay/Morquendi's entries:
# I'm standing on the Galle road in Aluthgama and looking at 5 ton trawlers tossed onto the road. Scary shit.
# Found 5 of my friends, 2 dead. Of the 5, 4 are back in Colombo. The last one is stranded because of a broken bridge. Broken his leg. But he's alive. Made...
# ..contact. He got swept away but swam ashore. Said he's been burying people all day. Just dragging them off the beach and digging holes with his hands. Go..
#..ing with gear to get him tommorrow morning. He sounded disturbed. Guess grave digging does that to you.
He writes:
The looting and the fact that some people are taking advantage of this situation.. is that human..? people looting and people hijacking vehicles is one of the biggest problems faced by the relief workers.. due to this, roads have been closed, curfew has been imposed after dark and people are just scared to tread there.. one of the main causes for this is the fact that due to the wave the prisons have been damaged and highly dangerous criminals have broken free.. not only criminals but some drug abusers too have been taking advantage and pilferring to get their daily dose.. but these aren't the only people taking advantage.. due to the need of food and rations, there is now a high demand for bread etc in Colombo.. some supermakets and even small boutiques in areas have risen the price of bread to Rs40/-.. (usually 15/-)
He posts a first-person account on his own weblog:
Before I could turn around everyone on the tracks was screaming. And running. The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. The children managed to run back up onto the tracks. No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. In about 2 minutes it had reached the level of the railway tracks and was coming over it. We had run about a hundred meters by this time. I continued to rise. I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee deep in water, refusing to move, convinced that the end of the world had come. I spoke to him later. He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach and that he would rather die there than run. A boy broke away from his mother to run back into the house to get his dog who was apparently afraid of the water. An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son.
And he also reports that the Tamil Tigers are collecting relief aid and not distributing it where needed.
Boing Boing posts a plea from a reader vacationing in Thailand: "Just since I know you guys are at the nexus of a lot of information: I'm here in Thailand on holiday, been staying on the island of Koh Samui on the east side of Thailand. We had been planning to go to Krabi (one of the places hit hard in southern thailand) in a couple of days for a psy-trance party. Now we're thinking of keeping the flight tp Krabi and trying to volunteer to help however we can. Any ideas on how to find out if any organization would want volunteers and where/what? I tried a few sites like Red Cross, etc but didn't notice any info on emergency volunteering."
