Notebook: Tsunami – One Year After

Barry Petersen Visits The Tsunami-Stricken Region One Year Later

(CBS) 

Day Three

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia

It started with a question from my wife, Jan, when I said we were having trouble finding hotel rooms in Banda Aceh.

“Hotels,” she said with a strange look. “But there’s nothing left.”

Actually, darling, there pretty much two-thirds of the city left. And thank goodness, because that is making all the difference in the relief efforts.

The Banda Aceh we all know from TV news are areas near the water, and in this city alone, some 90-thousand people in those areas were killed within minutes as the tsunami roared ashore. To this day, many bodies are still missing.

But the rest of the city was almost untouched…and more than 200-thousand people go about their business and daily lives. It made a big difference. The airport was not damaged and, although it is small, it could handle the supplies that started flowing within days of the disaster. Roads from the outside are still usable, which means trucks could start rolling with more supplies, trucks that continue rolling now but carrying building materials, not the basic food and water of those first days.

But don’t forget…the tsunami came after a 9.3 earthquake, one of the strongest the Earth has ever felt. It rippled through Banda Aceh, heaving the ground up and down. That’s all but destroyed the sewer and water systems, and even the few areas with water will need new pipes. The whole city needs the Mother of all plumbing jobs.

It leads to a kind of strangeness, as our producer Alec Sirken pointed out: a city where you can’t flush the toilet in most neighborhoods, but your international cell phone works and you can call New York or London in an instant.

And there’s been a bit of an economic boom, not what you’d expect after a tsunami. But so many aid workers flowed in, and they need local staff to help in the office or drive. They organized construction projects and that means work for fishermen who once barely eked out a living.

New homes, going up slowly, mean people are buying new TVs and furniture. And all of this is good, very good.

It means Banda Aceh is on the road back. Not everyone. Not everywhere. But for now, going very much in the right direction.

And, alas, with no hotel rooms for such as us because there are so many aid workers coming and going along with journalists and they got the few rooms first. We rented bedrooms in the house of a family that is making a few extra dollars helping wayward journalists find a bed for the night.

And we are grateful.