Tsunami-hit Tonga rekindles memories for University employees

In the aftermath of the tidal wave that hit the archipelago, three members of the University community share how tsunamis have impacted their personal and professional lives. The waiting was the hardest part. Two days after the deadliest tsunami in recorded history slammed into the coasts of a dozen South and Southeast Asian countries, killing hundreds of thousands of people, Suresh Atapattu still hadn't heard from his mother and father in Sri Lanka. The small island nation bore the brunt of the destructive wave, which hit a day after Christmas of 2004 and was triggered by a magnitude-9.1 undersea earthquake. With most communication lines out of the country severed, he feared the worst. "I had to rely on television and internet news coverage for updates,” said Atapattu, who was a graduate student at the University of Miami at the time. "What was frightening was that the reports got progressively worse as the scale of the damage sunk in.