"It really killed me seeing him go."

There were those who had to rush not away from the ocean – but towards it – as they moved to ensure the wheels for a disaster response were in motion. Palantina Toelupe is the CEO for Health in Samoa. She lives in the coastal village Vailoa, on the outskirts of Apia with her two sons. The younger son Vaitoa is Filomena Nelson’s right hand at the DMO office. As the earthquake built in intensity and then shuddered to a still, Vaitoa yelled for his mum and brother to run. “Mum, there’s going to be a tsunami. You’ve got about five minutes, you’ve got to run, you’ve got to go NOW!” Palantina ran but was bewildered to see Vaitoa accelerating in his car for the opposite direction. “Where are YOU going?” His reply clamped her with a cold fist of fear. “I have to go to Mulinu’u, to the Met office! I have to report, to get the computers up.” She clearly remembers that awful moment. “It was one of the most horrible decisions any mother could make, knowing that you were supposed to run for your life and yet your son is going towards this supposed problem…It really killed me seeing him go. I ran and took his older brother with me and we were the first ones to get up to Faleata, that’s how quickly we evacuated…but when we got up there, I stopped and said to myself, what am I running for? What about my job? I’ve forgotten everything! And so we turned around and came back home and when I got back, people were just starting to run – that’s how early we ran. We got to the house, quickly changed and we went straight to the hospital. I got there and people were asking, what’s going to happen next?And I said, prepare – get ready for the emergency.”

We just want to go home.

Injured are airlifted out by the RNZAF.
When people are hurt and afraid, all they want is to get home. As fast as possible. Foreign nationals critically injured in the Samoa tsunami were airlifted out of Samoa. One woman remembers talking to the injured tourists in the hospital the morning after the tsunami. “They were so polite and appreciative of everything we were doing for them. We asked them if they needed anything else and they said, no, no we’re fine… But then, the first medical team arrived from Australia. They walked into the ward and as soon as they spoke to these tourists, those girls just burst into tears, they said, please, please can you help us, please get us out of here,we just want to go home. My heart just went out to them, I cried inside for them.”

The first airlift went out on Wednesday afternoon, the last on Friday. Aussie paramedic Steve Williams helped get the patients ready and moved out to the helicopters that would ferry them to the international airport some distance out of Apia. “The evacuation team were fantastic. Their attitude with the patients was really good – like if it was someone who was a bit large, they’d lift them on the stretcher and they’d all scream and grunt and carry on joking, overemphasise it, get the patient laughing. They actually played around with the patients and tried to make it more enjoyable for them, showing humor in what was a really scary situation for some of them.”

The helicopters landed in a small grassy patch between the emergency morgue and the wards. “The last lift was 8:30 at night, pitch black and so the pilot flew in blind and watching them come in was just magnificent. They had to land in this small space and it’s not even flat, there’s a dip in the ground and they landed in the dip, and I’m going geeze! Even in daylight it was pretty impressive and you think back and you’re just so impressed with what these pilots did. I watched all the patients go and it was a really nice feeling when the last chopper took off that night, knowing everyone was on their way home to their families.”

After. Thoughts. From Commissioner Tony Hill, FESA

Commissioner Hill with overseas disaster response team members. Photo courtesy of the NZ Defence Force.

“I didn’t know that Mother Nature could be like this. I had trained for it but to have it happen in our own back yard, I just couldn’t believe it. Cyclones Ofa and Val were nothing like this. Out of the blue like this. The amount of lives that were lost …If it had hit Apia, we would have lost so much more. We were lucky it was early hours of the morning. People were awake. People were evacuating. We were very lucky that it was only a very small percentage of Samoa that got hit. It’s a wake up call. Its telling us – hey, you’ve got to be prepared. Out of all this, we’ve been very fortunate, we’ve got a lot of equipment given to us by the Australians and New Zealanders when they were here helping us out… What it’s saying to me now, is that you’ve got the equipment and you’ve got to put it into place and be ready.” Commissioner Tony Hill, Fire and Emergency Services Authority, Samoa.