Vacationing doctor swiftly goes to work

What was planned as a quick beach vacation for a University of Washington physician and his family turned into two days of medical triage and critical first aid in a Thai beach resort.

In the hours after the tsunami hit Patong Beach on the island of Phuket on Dec. 26, Dr. Mark Oberle, associate dean of the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine, even drew on first-aid skills he had learned as a Boy Scout.

Bleeding was stopped with strips torn from table cloths and sheets. Broken bones were splinted with broken furniture. Wounds were cleaned with bottled water from hotel rooms and bars. Plastic lounge chairs were used as stretchers.

And Oberle recruited uninjured hotel guests to help in the effort.

"Most, because they were so anxious, were eager to help out," Oberle said in a news briefing yesterday. "We had stretcher bearers in 20 minutes. ... But communication was difficult [with many languages spoken]. Sometimes it was like the Tower of Babel."

Oberle, his wife Mardie, and son William had spent Christmas at the home of friends in Bangkok before flying to Phuket late Christmas night. Sleeping in, they were awakened by the bed shaking from the earthquake 400 miles away.

The threat of a tsunami didn't dawn on them until they saw people running through the lobby and "a roiling mass of water and debris" coming around the beachfront hotels in front of them.

As two big waves and many smaller ones filled up the first floors of the hotels, floating furniture and debris began taking its toll on trapped hotel guests.

"It made a very weird grinding noise on the first floors," Oberle said. "It was pretty clear that if they didn't make it out of there, they weren't going to survive."

Most of the many injuries Oberle treated were deep cuts and broken bones.

A young Thai woman, for example, had a broken right arm and many cuts and abrasions contaminated with sand. A German woman had deep cuts, a broken or severely bruised shoulder and thick tar on her skin. Oberle heard of a 12-year-old girl escaping with only scrapes across her back when a car floated over her as she was underwater.

Oberle waded through water, slipped in mud and had to climb across car tops in his flip-flop shoes to reach some people. It was hours before the first ambulance crews could get into the area.

Waves of anxiety also washed through the resort. At least three unfounded reports of other approaching tsunamis sent people scrambling into the hills or clogging the streets with motorcycles and cars. But sometimes the reasons for commotion were not clear, he said.

At one point after the water receded, a young American orchestra conductor vacationing from his home in Denmark, stood on a chair in the hotel lobby and instructed panicked guests to keep calm, keep their children near, not to run and check in periodically for possible word of an evacuation. His announcement seemed to bring calm for a time, Oberle said.

"He was used to telling [large] groups what to do," he said.

After hours treating the injured, Oberle and his family trekked up the side of a mountain when hotel managers evacuated the buildings because another tsunami might be coming. By dusk, when no new waves had arrived, they returned to the town and found a hotel restaurant open for dinner. The next morning, they caught a flight off the island.

Oberle said that with all the attention on aid for the tsunami victims, the U.S. government should rethink its overall commitment to foreign aid for health care in developing countries. In those countries, for example, more than 1 million people a year die from measles, there are 140 million unintended pregnancies a year and a woman has 50 times the risk of dying during childbirth than in developed nations.

The United States is far behind many other countries in its aid, he said, giving about $30 per U.S. citizen to nations in need. Scandinavian countries, for example, give about seven times that amount.

Warren King: 206-464-2247 or wking@seattletimes.com