25 - FOOT WAVES HIT TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

SHOCK WAVE
Vendors' stalls, car park over-run by 25-foot-high swirls
Roxanne Stapleton rstapleton@trinidadexpress.com

Monday, October 17th 2005

THERE WAS panic yesterday at Maracas Beach, when a series of towering waves, many more than 25 feet high, sent seabathers, vendors and lifeguards running for their lives.
In one instance, a child who was seconds before building a sand castle was thrown by one of the waves and a man in tears went after the toddler.
The child was rescued.

Not a boat was in sight at Maracas.

Fishermen moved the vessels to shore by mid-morning, but when the massive waves started breaking on the beach they moved them out of sight, lifeguards told the Daily Express.
The waves raced past the shoreline onto vending stalls, before crossing the roadway and flooding out the car park and bake and shark vendors' stalls on the northern side of the main thoroughfare.

Refrigerators, stoves and gas tanks stood in knee-high water inside vendor stalls, as their owners watched hopelessly at their losses.

Lifeguards used a megaphone to warn people to stay away from the beach.

The swells, which began pounding the North Coast shoreline at around 11 a.m., continued late into the evening.

There were reports that pirogues at Las Cuevas, Blanchisseuse and La Fillette were destroyed by the swells.

Several seabathers lost car keys, cell phones, clothing and foodstuff and resorted to contacting relatives to come to their rescue, the Daily Express learned.

Around 2.15 p.m., two waves, described by lifeguards as more than 25 feet high, followed each other simultaneously, taking everyone by surprise.

To escape the waves, an Express team, along with eight other people, mounted an elevated stage located between the lifeguard quarters and two abandoned structures.

People all around were shouting, scampering and screaming as the water engulfed the stage.
Lifeguards ordered a mandatory evacuation of the beach just before 3 p.m.

Lifeguard Allister Livingston said: "People were asking if these conditions were related to tsunamis and if it was safe to stay."

"As things got worse, we started seeing that the backwash was also increasing in intensity and started to worry about that. The lifeguard quarters were flooded out with some of the waves a while ago."

"It's been over ten years since we've experienced anything like this-you have waves that are coming in at 20 to 25 feet and in between you have sets of 12 to 18 feet."

Bake and shark vendor Vilma Guerra, 42, who was born and has lived all her life in Maracas, recounted what she described as a "day of horror".

"Wave after wave just came gushing inside the stall and I wondered if we were going to experience a tsunami. It's the worst I've ever seen in Maracas.

"We started piling sand around the stall to stop the water, but the waves just came and pushed the sand down. You could imagine waves breaking on the sand. It was just madness.

"Maybe if they didn't move the seawall, it might not have been so bad."

Environmentalist Dr Julian Kenny said: "It's just erratic storm activity. There hasn't been any major earthquake activity to generate these waves. It's a bit unusual, but it's just normal storm activity-it's normal to have extremes. "

Officials at the Meteorological Centre at Piarco were not available for comment.