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An Ocean Springs man and his business partner survived after being swept up by the monster tsunami that killed more than 52,000 people in coastal countries
along the Indian Ocean, the wife of one of the men says.
When the water receded in the coastal town in India, Joe Miller of Ocean Springs and Doug Pardue of Hattiesburg wound up trapped underneath the auto-rickshaw they had been riding. They survived with scratches and bruises.
"My husband said he thought he was going to die," said Miller's wife, Kathy. "They didn't think they were going to make it."
The two men were taking pictures from the motorized vehicle in Cochin, located on the southwestern coast of India, when the tidal wave hit, Kathy Miller said Monday.
"All of the sudden they look and they see a 30-foot wall of water coming at them," Kathy Miller told The Sun Herald newspaper.
"They couldn't get out fast enough. It came down on them. This three-wheeler thing that has a canvas top over it that they were traveling in flipped. My husband got pinned under and couldn't get out. He was trapped between the mud and this thing. He was trapped almost two hours."
The men had to free themselves because there was no one to help, Kathy Miller said her husband told her. She said she learned about the tsunami when she awakened around 5 a.m. Sunday with an uneasy feeling and turned on the news.
"I finally got a call about 7 a.m. Sunday stating he was OK," she said. "We have a computer set up so we can actually speak over the computer. He called from his office."
Miller had been in India about a week and plans to spend another week or two finishing up work.
"He said he won't be going on the beach for quite some time," Kathy Miller said.
In Starkville, Arun Ramakrishnan got a call from a friend a few days ago saying that 28 people were killed in Chennai, India, by an earthquake.
"I thought it was just a minor tremor," said Ramakrishnan, a master's student at Mississippi State University whose mother, father and brother live in Chennai.
After checking the Internet and reading more about the earthquake and tidal waves that devastated Asia and parts of Africa—including news the death toll was climbing in Chennai—he began to worry.
He called his family and was relieved to find everyone OK. But the beach, which was home to many fisherman now left homeless or dead, is only an hour's drive away.
"No one could ever foresee that this was coming," Ramakrishnan told The Clarion-Ledger newspaper.
Sandra Woolfolk, 40, an MSU doctoral student, called her family members in Jakarta, Indonesia, to see if they had felt any reverberations from the disaster.
They were unharmed, but Woolfolk can't get over the staggering death toll.
"It just shocks me every time I read the news," said Woolfolk, who heads the MSU Indonesian Student Association.
"The number of people who died every day was like thousands more whenever I read the news. It was really unexpected. I never thought something would happen like this."
Others watched television news broadcasts of the devastation.
"I was really shocked to see so much human life going bad," said Indira Rao, 62, a Brandon resident whose family in India does not live near the affected area.
Amrut Patel's family lives near Bombay and also was safe, but the televised images left him, too, in awe.
"That is unbelievable," said Patel, an electrical and mechanical engineer who lives in Brandon. "You can't even think how water can move like that."
Patel said the disaster in India is compounded by the country's dense population, weak infrastructure and poor communication, especially in coastal fishing villages.
"There is no car or no bus, and everybody is in villages," he said. "So they just stay there."
Patel, 61, and others said local members of the Indian community will start a collection of money to send to India, much like they did a few years ago when an earthquake struck.
At that time, those in the Jackson area handed over $100,000 to the Red Cross to help rebuild villages, he said.
Ramakrishnan, 24, as president of MSU's India Student Association, hopes to collect donations from international students at his school as well.
