UCF professor survives, relays messages to world
The earthquake hit with the popping of concrete, screeching of twisting metal and the thudding sounds of bottles, books and bits of plaster falling from the shelves and walls of Charles Harpole's hotel room.
"I knew that I'd either be dead in a few seconds because the building would crash down or I'd get out and be fine," the vacationing University of Central Florida professor said early Friday. "There was that sense of finality."
Harpole and other members of a ham-radio club were just north of the quake's epicenter on the picturesque Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal between India and Thailand.
It was 6:30 a.m. Sunday, when Harpole was shaken from his bed to discover the walls of his room shaking and the floor turned to jelly.
"I was on the fifth floor, and it was difficult to walk because the floor was shifting. It was either too high or too low," he said in a telephone interview from the home of his wife's family in Samut Sakhon, Thailand.
Harpole said he knew the safest place to be was beneath a doorway, so he made his way to the bathroom doorway and held on for what seemed like six or seven minutes of shaking in the 9.0-magnitude earthquake.
When things finally settled, Harpole got dressed and fled the building, discovering to his joy that everyone in his party has escaped uninjured.
Because their hotel was on a high mountain ridge, Harpole said, it wasn't affected by the tsunami. But as he and his team realized the scope of the disaster, they set up their radio equipment and started relaying messages.
For about 20 hours, the ham operators -- sometimes using car batteries to run their radios -- were the main link between the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the outside world, relaying information about survivors to anxious relatives and friends.
And with most telephone lines down and cell phones scarce, the ham-radio club's efforts proved invaluable as the scope of the disaster increased day after day.
The first messages were to let people on the Indian mainland know that those on the island were safe and unharmed.
A young waiter at Harpole's hotel asked them to get word to his mother in Hyderabad, India, that he was alive and well.
"We found a ham-radio operator on the mainland, gave the mother's telephone number," Harpole said. Within five minutes a ham operator in Hyderabad called the waiter's mother and relayed the message.
"He told us the mother was crying with joy," he said.
Harpole's group cheered and clapped. Word spread quickly across the island, and their work went on for hours and hours.
When Indian government officials learned of the hamradio operators, they relayed messages for official requests for medicines, water and blankets. Several of the radio operators headed south to Nicobar.
Harpole decided it was time for him to head to Thailand for a reunion with his wife and her family who were safely inland.
"I was concerned, that this being an Indian operation and here I was this American, I should step aside," he said.
At his in-laws' house, he had his own radio equipment and has been relaying messages throughout Thailand, India and Sri Lanka.
"People are asking, 'Can you find so-and-so,' and so forth," he said.
Harpole, an amateur-radio enthusiast since he was 14, had been working for years with fellow enthusiasts in India to get permission to set up a station on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which consist of 572 islands, big and small, inhabited and uninhabited.
Amateur-radio buffs collect calls from geographic zones, trying to reach remote parts of the world and put pins in maps to mark the locations. But because of the Indian government's concern for security, a swath of the globe had been off-limits until Harpole and his friends persuaded the leaders to lift the ban.
About two weeks ago, Harpole and his friends arrived in the harbor town of Port Blair to set up the first ham-radio station and lounge on the tropical, white, sandy beaches.
It was an idyllic holiday until the quake hit.
Harpole, who founded the film program at UCF, expects to be back in Orlando soon. He said that the devastation throughout the Indian Ocean rim is hard to comprehend. The full toll may never be known. That's because many rural island and coastal villages never had a census, and "for some of those places, there isn't anyone left alive to say how many people had lived there," he said.
"Many islands were washed completely over from one side to the other. I've seen horrible, horrible destruction," Harpole said. "It's shocking beyond the telling. Piles of cars, broken buildings and boats where there used to be towns and people. The stories from people being hit by the wave -- so unexpected. People having coffee, and then they're gone."
Christopher Sherman of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report. Rich McKay can be reached at 407-420-5470 or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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