The Day After Christmas: Covering The Tsunami
Aftermath
by Martyn Green
With more than 270,000 people dead or missing as a result of the Boxing Day (December 26) Indian Ocean tsunami, it was the biggest, known, natural disaster in human history. And Hong Kong-based cameraman Martyn Green was there, as a member of the team of six cameramen for international TV news organization APTN, covering the aftermath stories of rescue and relief work. We have two reports from Green on the subject: last month from the point of view of the cameramen, and now focusing on the technology of getting the stories back.
Early in the morning of December 26th, 2004, an earthquake occurred far out to sea, off the West coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The effect of the mega-thrust was like a huge undersea landslide, creating a massive wall of water that was soon silently hurtling towards beaches around the Indian Ocean, at 500 mph. As it reached shallow water, the low frequency wave slowed, changed in pitch and rose up to form a mighty wave thirty feet high, to -- in some places -- a towering 60 feet. Those in its path had little chance of survival…
Although the Asian tsunami was several months ago, those of us who witnessed the terrible scenes of the aftermath still remember it all so clearly. The beaches strewn with bodies; the Buddhist temples, pressed into service as morgues, reeking of formalin and decay; the destruction; the tremendous loss of lives, each an individual tragedy; and the overwhelming feeling of sadness…
The Indian Ocean tsunami was an international tragedy, not just because it hit the shores of a number of countries, but because in places like southern Thailand, so many of those who were hurt or died were tourists from a variety of European nations, as well as North America.
The effect of amateur videotapes of the approaching tsunamis, along with the wall-to-wall news coverage of the aftermath (at least in Europe) was dramatic, and awe-inspiring. In the UK alone the money raised to help the victims of the tsunami broke all records for fund raising, with the figures leaping up by enormous amounts every day, eventually reaching millions of pounds.
Says one British woman, involved with UK charities, "Certainly it was a staggering amount -- people had NEVER given like that before. And it was no doubt largely due to the television news reports, which brought the full horror of the unfolding story right into people's living rooms."
Along with sensitivity, such a massive event required huge resources for the news coverage. Fortunately, APTN (Associated Press TV News) has an office in Bangkok and, despite the obvious priority given to the relief efforts, within 12 hours of the event, they were able to get their first camera crew down to Phuket, the tourist island in southern Thailand that, along with nearby Khao Lak, on the mainland, was the most severely affected area.
Covering such a widespread tragedy, with all its ramifications, while no match for the massive relief operations that followed, was still almost without parallel. As APTN's Deputy Managing Editor, Asia, based in Bangkok, Dan Furnad had to manage coverage of the effects of the tsunami and the relief operations effectively and efficiently. He describes what it took to cover the tsunami aftermath in Southern Thailand.
"Managing a television team of 6 - 7 camera people for APTN was an exciting challenge," admits Dan Furnad. "But with so much tragedy all around, in Thailand the stories were not hard to find. Indeed, both tragedy and hope could be seen side by side, everywhere we pointed a camera."
Dan says that the biggest task he faced was to identify the most compelling images and storylines, and to try and assemble and transmit them, while not losing track of other storylines that were constantly developing.
Being an agency, APTN tries to serve clients all over the globe, so besides looking for the best stories, it also needed to look out for smaller elements, such as some Alaskan firefighters arriving to help; Japanese search and rescue helicopters flying off on a mercy mission; the makeshift Swedish consulate dealing with family members looking for loved ones; and a Singaporean family searching for a missing couple.
"The energy and imagination that was exhibited by our team covering their individual stories made me feel very proud," admits Dan. "With a story of this magnitude and breadth, we had to cobble together a group that hadn't worked together before. At the same time, we were putting together operations with the same strength in Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka."
APTN was also sending crews to the Maldives, the Andaman Islands, and aboard several US naval vessels involved in search and rescue and the delivery of aid. "The team in Phuket included three freelancers who were normally based in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Israel; two staffers who are based with me in Bangkok and staffers brought in from Taiwan and Rome," says Dan. "This proved to be a very effective combination."
He continues, "As I recognized each individual's strengths, I tried to match them up with assignments that suited them best, relying on their natural curiosity and professionalism to drive them to produce moving accounts of the destruction, search for survivors, volunteer efforts and attempts to rebuild."
The achievements of the team were many, says Dan. Among the highlights he recalls were the first pictures of the destruction of Khao Lak resort, a grisly sight that was closed off before other cameras could capture the horror. There were also gripping tales of hope and woe, ranging from a Swedish man doggedly searching for his wife, to an American weeping on the shoulders of his Japanese in-laws, explaining that he was only away from his wife for just five minutes of their holiday, the father assuring him, "It's not your fault."
Dan goes on, "Stories of hope also sprung up, such as aid trucks organized by a British bar owner; a German film director handing out food, toys and money to inhabitants of a destroyed fishing village; and a resort hotel offering its premises to children whose school had been wrecked. And of course this particular story will be remembered for its explosion of amateur video. With the gradual building of the tsunami, the places hit -- including many vacation destinations -- the proliferation of small video cameras and the wide swath that the waves cut, there was a unique amount of opportunities to capture the terrible destruction as it was taking place.
"While others were soon quickly volunteering to help rebuild, though, we had a different job to do -- observing and informing. Hopefully in our own way, through motivating the international community with our pictures and storylines, we contributed something positive to this unprecedented disaster."
Getting The Story Out
The Indian Ocean tsunami disaster highlighted how much broadcasting equipment is available in Asia, and gave major news organizations like APTN the chance to put to good use some of their latest gadgets for transmitting pictures.
Says Dan Furnad, "As the story developed, I consulted with our head of news in London, Sandy MacIntyre, about where we should send satellite dishes in order to transmit news video and to supply client stations with live shot locations. Through APTN's marketing executive Y K Chan in Hong Kong we nailed down a dish from Mediacorp (formerly SBC, then TCS) in Singapore. Our first thought was to go to the epicenter in Aceh, but with so few foreigners living there and the area being pretty inaccessible, we decided to go to Sri Lanka instead.
"In the meantime we found out that the European Broadcasting Union, or EBU, was doing an operation with Bangkok production house Asiaworks in Phuket, so we knew we would have a feedpoint there. Actually, while the Thai government's Channel 11 has a feedpoint there all the time, the EBU were the first to get a dish down to Phuket. They chartered a plane that left before midnight on December 26th, and the dish was set up by 5 AM on Monday December 27th."
After a couple more days, London decided to send a dish to Aceh, giving APTN the first outside transmission facility. Indonesia's Telkom, which runs many outlying feedpoints in the country, were already operating their own fixed dish there. Telkom usually sends their signal on a dedicated transponder on the Palapa satellite. It is then down-linked in Jakarta by Satellindo which sends it on another satellite to international customers. APTN receives it on an AsiaSat satellite.
Dish operations in Indonesia are usually pretty straightforward. To get the equipment in, though, it may be necessary to bribe customs or other local officials, but after that it is just a question of finding a suitable location, providing power (usually with a generator) and starting transmissions.
Dan notes that Thailand's Phuket Island was the most comfortable location to operate from. "We were in the Novotel Coralia hotel near Patong Beach in Kalim Bay, so we had power, workspace and food. But in Sri Lanka and Aceh our crews were less lucky," he says. "Aceh (also known as Acheh) was particularly tough as our crew had to sleep on the ground in damaged buildings and all the power had to come from generators. Naturally, being the tough international journalists that they are, they adapted to the conditions, and transmissions were for the most part efficient."
The EBU/Asiaworks group in Phuket was operating a three-path dish, meaning they could put out three signals at the same time. An interesting point about the operation was the number of different formats that the group had to contend with. Broadcasters were shooting on a variety of media: Beta analog tape; Sony's first generation digital system, SX, which uses Beta tapes; Sony's latest generation of digital cameras, known as DVCam, which use smaller tapes -- similar to, but not the same as, consumer DV tapes -- and Panasonic's DVCPro, which also uses the smaller tapes, but which are not always interchangeable with the Sony system. This situation created a mess of playback decks which had to be routed to the different paths out, and many times required Dan having to run up three flights of stairs (with a deadline just minutes away) with a heavy Sony DSR-70AP "laptop" editing system, in order to play out the transmission tape.
But although Phuket may sometimes have been enervating for whoever had to lug a laptop system upstairs in a hurry, "Even in some out-of-the-way places, like The Maldives, we found it surprisingly easy to transmit," says Dan. "Yves Dam Van, our Hanoi-based producer, for instance, fed for free from the state broadcaster there, from facilities he described as both modern and well-managed."
APTN conquered some even more remote locations, including the Andaman Islands, and cutoff areas of the Sumatran coast. Explains Dan, "We did this with our livewire transmission systems. This consists of a laptop computer with editing software and a data transmission (FTP) program made by Voyager. We bring two satphones -- which have gone from weighing 40 kg to 15 kg over the past seven years -- and then compress the images, and transmit them digitally to our London headquarters. When both phones are able to connect, we can transmit one second of video in less than 30 seconds, which means about 30 minutes per minute of video. Of course," Dan points out, "the quality is not the same as sending from a satellite dish. There are digital "jerks" when the camera or subjects move, but overall the quality is good enough to give viewers a pretty good idea of what is happening.
"As technology improves," says Dan, finally, "we will continue to move towards sending pictures from anywhere and everywhere, as portably as we can manage. But in the meantime we will have to continue to lug our satellite dishes and cell phones around the world, providing viewers with images from every corner of the globe."
Editing System
The edit decks used by APTN to cover the tsunami aftermath were from Sony -- two 6.4 inch LCD screen model DSR-70AP decks docked together. This is a digital editing system that uses Sony DVCam tapes, but which can also play back Panasonic DVCPro tapes and mini-DV tapes.
Comments APTN's Dan Furnad, "While many of us in the business no doubt wish that someday the professional broadcasting manufacturers would agree on just one tape format we could all use, I know that won't happen. What will happen over the next decade is that we will begin recording on disk and editing on laptop computers. We are already employing computer editing on some remote "satphone" transmissions. When we do eventually standardize, when everyone is editing on computer, feedpoints will become less confusing places, as news organizations will just walk up and plug their lightweight notebook computers into whichever cable leads to their assigned satellite feed path."
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