PBL Earthquake Tsunami Narrative

It started with the noise. An overwhelming, mind bending noise coming from deep below the ground. Was this the work of a God?

My ears were ringing more intensely than I had ever experienced. And they were wet. Wet? I brought my quivering hand up to my left lobe and felt the familiar sticky consistency of blood. A shiver shot down my spine.

As the noise died down a little, I pulled my stiff body off the floor from where I was cowering and walked over to the now dusty window of my seventh-floor apartment, looking down on the street below. My eyes widened and I let out a whimper.

The main street had been completely split apart and a gargantuan tear was running all the way down the middle of it to the next neighborhood, leaving a giant chasm between the buildings.

Cars were hanging off the edge of it, back wheels on the street and front wheels facing the menacing abyss. Which means that there was no doubt that some people had fallen - I made myself stop thinking. I felt my head would explode as I heard sirens blaring and the sound of helicopters surveying the disaster in the air.

Then there was another noise. Another loud noise that I was not sure my brain could take. I was about to clamp my hands down on my ears when I realized this sound was different. A screeching of metal and a creaking of frames.

My legs kicked in before my brain did. I grabbed my phone and my bag and sprinted out the door and down the stairs. It was the buildings. The buildings were giving out.

I remembered that you should never take elevators in circumstances like these and went for the stairs, leaping down sets at a time. When I finally reach the foyer, I realized that people had had the same idea and hundreds of people were pushing to evacuate the building, some helping elderly and children too.

I helped escort an old man out the door and then rushed out myself. I needed to get out from under these buildings.

I quickly surveyed my surroundings. People were spilling out onto the street from buildings everywhere, seeking safety. I looked to my right and saw the park, just a few blocks away. The park was a large block of open land inhabited only by trees, ponds, and benches. The perfect place to take cover.

I started jogging towards it, the screeching around me getting louder by the minute. As I reached the entrance, I saw that some people had already taken cover under trees with their families, and some on their phones, calling for help and crying to their relatives.

I spotted a large old oak tree with vast branches that provided good shelter. I started running towards it, passing crying children with their parents, startled animals, and a group of old people silently praying as chaos ensued around them.

It was somewhat calming and for a few seconds the world slowed down and I was able to hear the crickets chirping in the grass, the fish burbling in the pond, and the birds whistling in the trees.

As I regained my senses, the world rushed back like raging water through my ears, eyes, and mouth, the overwhelming sense of fear returning like a curse.

As I reached the tree, it loomed over me, large limbs bringing shade from the dust covered sky. I curled up by the trunk in its warm embrace, suddenly sleepy from the strain my muscles and head had been through. I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep within seconds.

I was shaken out of my slumber by another deep, rumbling noise. It was not the eardrum rupturing noise from before. A more distant, colossal noise. A noise that worried me more than anything that had happened previously.

When I stood up and looked around, I almost fell back to the floor with horror. Why was this happening to us? I counted four massive apartment buildings completely fallen and crumbled. Rubble was scattered everywhere, and the main buildings were just piles of boulders. Small fires were lit everywhere and were illuminating the dim sky, the sun falling behind the hills. I realized it was now dusk.

As I slowly stood up and started stumbling out of the park and down the street, it was the powerful smells that caught my attention as I got closer to the scene. The smell of burnt wood and crushed concrete seared my nostrils. The smell of destruction and loss. The smell of hard work and much dedication being abolished so effortlessly.

And there was another smell. This one was much more pungent. Much sharper and more distinctive. The sickeningly sweet, metallic smell of blood. I was hunched over within seconds, emptying the contents of my stomach onto the street. The bodies. They were scattered everywhere, lifeless, and cold. As if they were nothing. Some were crushed beneath rubble, some dead in their vehicles, and I knew many more were hidden deep within the buildings, never to be found.

I heard cries from the park I had just come from and turned around to see a large group of people emerging from within. Some families holding their children, some old people silently staring onward, and some collapsing in sorrow.

A teenage boy ran forward out of the crowd, pushing past me, and running towards the wreck. People yelled at him to come back but he kept running. I started running after him, to make sure he didn’t get hurt. He reached a body that was half crushed beneath a boulder. It was a middle-aged man, his eyes closed and his heart still. “Dad! DAD!”, the boy screamed. He held the man’s head in his hands and broke down sobbing.

I felt more horrible than I had the whole time this disaster was happening. I felt like it was my fault for some reason. I knew it wasn’t, but it tore at my heart. A sinking feeling that I could do something about this, as idiotic as it was. I knew I wasn’t a hero, or a special person at all. I just felt so guilty for some reason.

The boy had gone silent, and he slowly walked back to the group, head low, and eyes dark. It was now that I realized the deep, far away rumbling had stopped, and was now replaced with a more violent, thrashing sound. It reminded me of the great flowing River Thames in winter when we had gone to visit London many years ago. The amazing sound of a behemoth mass of water all gushing at once, travelling to a destination I was not sure of. It was mesmerizing back then. But this sound was more immense. It sounded vast and monstrous. It was getting closer. It was getting closer.

That’s when I saw it. A monolithic body of ocean had coalesced and was thundering towards us, with no signs of stopping. Then I realized what the second rumbling had been. The tectonic plates under the city that I’d learned about in school, years back, had grinded violently up against each other, causing a cataclysmic earthquake to rupture the surface of the city. That much I had already worked out.

The second, more gradual one, however, had confused me when it started, but now I understood. I had heard about undersea earthquakes that had impacted cities around the world, but never fully registered the scale of them.

The rumbling that I had heard faraway, was another earthquake, out to sea. Now I realized the reason that ocean earthquakes were so much more volatile and dangerous. The tremendous wall of raging water had now reached the edge of the city and was still growing as it gathered. Then it hit the first buildings in the city. These buildings were meant to form a wall against rising sea levels, but no-one could have predicted a wave of this mass to ever attack the city. It easily smashed through them and continued its roaring path towards us.

I started to hear people screaming and understanding what was about to happen. The thought of death entered my head. A topic that I had never fully come to grips with. I had never feared death before, because I thought that it would be something that I would be ready for, but it was only just now, after all that had happened, that I realized I was probably going to die.

Terror instantly gripped my heart as I realized this was the end. No-one was coming to save us. We would perish at the hands of Mother Nature. I fell hard on my knees, clutching my chest.

The tears came, salty like the wave that would undoubtedly end it all. I found it so poetic that I laughed, and as the wave tumbled into the street ahead of us, I was not able to hear the people screaming, the wave roaring and raging, the buildings tumbling before us.

I laughed even harder because I had read about this in books. The peace you feel before you pass. Your senses going numb and all you can feel is yourself. I remember thinking what a load of crap it was. But it was true. And the light. The light that surrounded me in the seconds before the end. A fulfilling light. One that made me feel complete, even with my impending death an inch away. The water hit me.

I felt my consciousness slip, as I smiled more than I ever had before.

And as I faded away, the last memory was the warmth that I felt in my last moments. The warmth that assured me I was returning home.

The PBL topic for Term 1 was sustainability. 

Kohima chose to write a fictional, narrative piece on the effects of Climate change in natural disaster form.