IT WAS just before 7am Samoan time yesterday when the earth groaned and the trees shook. That was the only warning many of the people on the islands of Samoa and American Samoa would have of what was to come.
Deep under the ocean, somewhere midway between the two island groups, a shift in the restless Pacific plates had triggered a major earthquake - magnitude measuring 8.0 to 8.3 on the Richter scale. Sleepers were shaken awake. Early risers watched as the sea suddenly retreated, the tide sucking the water way down the beach, the inhale before the exhale. There was little time to run.
In some places alarms sounded. In others, local men began shouting and banging on gas cylinders - sounding them like church bells - in an urgent, improvised alert. Some locals dragged their heels, thinking it was just another tsunami trial alarm. When realisation dawned, the panic came.
Most Samoans live by the water, which provides their livelihoods, and where tourists are drawn to a string of exotic resorts capitalising on Samoa's appeal as a remote Polynesian paradise, halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand.
Melbourne school teachers John and Robyn Jaffe, making the most of their South Pacific escape, had already long since left their luxury hotel room at the Virgin Cove Resort.
Robyn Jaffe had just finished a shower in the rainforest fringing the beach when she felt the rumble under her feet. But it wasn't until locals began running past her that she grew alarmed and scrambled up on to a water tank for safety. From her perch she saw her husband picked up by the wave as it pushed into the jungle and dragged him through the rocks and undergrowth.
John Jaffe, who teaches at Lilydale High School, guesses the wall of water was maybe 12 metres high when he first sighted it way out on the horizon - a ''very tall, beautiful, strong wave''. And terrifying.
It took two minutes, perhaps, to hit the beach, he says, mercifully losing some of its ferocity as it crossed the reef, but still powering on to the land so strong and so fast that all he could do was submit, instinctively turning into himself for safety. ''I just tried to keep my body small so I wouldn't break an arm or a leg,'' he said. He survived with scratches and bruises.
The Jaffes found shelter at a nearby primary school along with fellow resort guests including New Zealand bride-to-be Kimberly Brown who, with her fiance, Preston McNeil, was feeling lucky to be alive. The first they knew of the danger was the deep, distant rumble. The sound materialised as a giant wave with a foaming head, with more waves coming over the top, building to the point that ''all of a sudden you realised there was just absolutely nothing you could do, and we just ran screaming to the van'', said Ms Brown.
But the wave hit, the van filled with water and the windows smashed. Photographs and video footage shows trucks and cars were pushed up to 100 metres inland and into buildings by the tsunami. The couple, along with fellow New Zealander Melissa Sharplin, made a decision to sprint into the forest to higher ground.
A series of five massive waves reportedly smashed into the islands in the minutes after the earthquake struck at 6.48am, churning the deep waters and triggering the tsunami that by last night was estimated to have claimed at least 100 lives, including at least four Australians - including an unnamed six-year-old girl, a Tasmanian woman, Maree Blacker, who had gone to the islands with her husband, John, to celebrate her 50th birthday, and secondary school teacher Vivien Hodgins, 55, of Ballarat.
Villages and resorts were flattened.
Anna Tui Annandale - one of Samoa's wealthiest women and co-owner of the exclusive Sinalei resort with her husband, Joe - drowned while she struggled to save children in the village of Poutasi, according to her friend and Deputy Samoan Prime Minister Misa Telefoni. Her husband was critically injured. It is feared many children, unable to save themselves as the water rushed in, are among the dead.
Sea Breeze resort owner Wendy Booth said she and her husband were nearly washed away by the wave. ''My husband and I just hung on to each other and the handrail …The force of the wave pushed furniture through the ceiling.''
New Zealand tourist Graeme Ansell, in the village of Faofao on Upolu Island, believed to be the worst affected, told New Zealand radio from a hill near the capital, Apia: ''The whole village has been wiped out. ''There's not a building standing.'' Roads were jammed and communications collapsed.
Among the people who escaped the wave were the cast and crew of the latest season of the CBS reality show Survivor. The network said no one from the program had been harmed.
Ray Hunt, a Melbourne man working locally, said he believed that 40 local people had died in one village alone. ''It's total chaos at the hospital. Bodies are coming in from all over the place; doctors trying to tend the injured,'' he said.
''You live in Samoa, this is supposed to be paradise. But I can tell you, it's not paradise. It's hell on earth.''
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