Reporter's notebook: 'Indescribable carnage'
By CNN's Matthew Chance
Editor's Note: Matthew Chance is a London-based CNN correspondent and part of the international network's team reporting the aftermath of the Asian tsunami. An hourlong special on the tsunami's impact on children, "Saving the Children" airs on CNN Thursday January 6 and Friday January 7.
KHAO LAK, Thailand (CNN) -- When the Asian tsunami hit, many of us suspected it would be a tragedy on a far greater scale than the initial casualty figures suggested. By the time I was called, my flights were already booked. And I know many others who've said the same.
This is not the first time I've witnessed and reported human catastrophe. As we touched down in Phuket -- holiday paradise turned scene of disaster -- I couldn't help thinking of Bam, the Iranian city destroyed by an earthquake a year earlier to the day.
The devastation we had found back then was almost too much to bear. Whole families, whole communities, a whole city was wiped out.
I remember meeting a boy of 15 pacing the debris, screaming with grief. His family, his friends, his neighbors, everybody he had ever known lay dead beneath the rubble. These are the kind of scenes you know await you.
To Thailand, like to Iran, we had carried our videophones. It would be days before the logistics of bringing in a satellite dish would be resolved. So in the debris we found a place to set up our telephones.
The image quality has improved beyond recognition from the early days and is getting better. One day soon, the technology could replace traditional satellite dishes, we're told. And I believe it. But for me this is still, first and foremost, live television where before none was possible.
Across southern Thailand, coastal and island resorts like Phuket, Ko Phi Phi and Krabi had been wrecked. Many thousands of Thais had been killed. But the hotels strung along the palm-fringed beaches were crowded with foreign tourists when waves towering 40 feet or more had hit.
Along one stretch of white sand, in the popular tourist resort of Khao Lak, as many as 20,000 visitors had been spending Christmas. Every hotel we visited there was crushed.
It is never easy to broadcast from these places; sometimes even getting there can be hard. The roads to Khoa Lak were gridlocked with anxious families looking for loved ones, even sightseers fascinated by the grisly disaster zone. It took us hours to reach it.
We found photographs and personal belongings of the holidaymakers littering the sand -- poignant reminders of what had happened here. At the town hall in Phuket, ghostly pictures of the lost have been pinned to noticeboards by loved ones desperate for information, even a body to take home.
In Iran it was winter, we had no food or water and worked day and night, dehydrated, until fresh teams arrived with supplies.
Thailand is hot, perhaps 35 degrees in the shade, if you can find any. The stench of rotting flesh is sickening. You can get ill. But compared to the victims and survivors of either disaster, we were in good shape.
And, of course, we eventually leave.
By far the biggest challenge, I believe, is in reporting these tragic events with sensitivity and respect -- foremost, to the victims and their families, but also to our viewers.
We have witnessed scenes of indescribable carnage in the makeshift morgues set up along the Thai coast. The twisted, decomposing remains of children, of newlyweds killed on honeymoon, of an elderly couple locked in a death embrace, unable to escape the waves. It is nauseating just to read about. Imagine the images.
There are some who argue we should show everything, and I agree we must be careful not to pull any punches in a story such as this. We can't escape the death.
Videophones have given us opportunities to show the world what is happening in a way and with an immediacy that was never possible before. But the question of how much is enough is one with which we are all forced to constantly grapple.
