Former Westbrook resident Katie Day, who was living on an island off the coast of Thailand when a series of tsunamis devastated the region in late 2004, left the country with her family earlier this year and is now living in Singapore.
Day’s sister, former Westbrook City Councilor Martha Day, said her sister and her family didn’t decide to leave their home in Phuket, Thailand, because of the damage from the tsunamis. They moved because they thought their children could get a better education in Singapore.
Day and her husband, David Appleton, have been living with their family in Asia since 1998, when they moved to Vietnam where Appleton started a software consulting firm. The family moved to Thailand in 2002.
In an interview last January, Day described the scene at the relief center in Phuket immediately after the Dec. 26 tsunami as “very sobering.”
Day said in the days after the tsunami the center was filled with “adults catatonically distraught at the loss of a spouse, people with severe cuts, bruises and wounds all over their bodies. Others are just lost, mentally and physically, from the experience.”
In October, Martha Day went to Singapore and went to visit Phuket with her sister. Day said she had never been to Phuket before, so it was hard for her to gauge the devastation for herself. But she said from what she witnessed, the island has begun to recover from the destruction, and the people there are rebuilding their lives.
Day said her sister would point out areas in Phuket where buildings had been destroyed by the tsunami and the resulting earthquakes, but there was no evidence of them. “A lot of buildings that were damaged were taken down,” she said.
Day said her sister and her family have settled comfortably into their new home in Singapore. Day said when she visited this fall, she found Singapore much different and more urban than Phuket. “It’s very well run,” she said. “Very clean and very modern.”
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