A devastated salt pan in Tamil Nadu. Telegraph picture

Vedaranyam, Jan. 9: The salt workers here saw the rare birds taking flight about ?half-an-hour before? the first tsunami struck but they did not know enough to save the historic salt pans.

?The tsunami came so stealthily. None of us knew this phenomenon,? said A. Vedaratnam, president of the Vedaranyam Salt Manufacturers and Merchants Association.

?But somehow the hundreds of spotted deer and black bucks in the wildlife sanctuary at Point Calimere and thousands of migratory birds that come every October-March seemed to know what was coming. They had all left for safer havens shortly before the tsunami struck,? he said.

From Vedaranyam to Point Calimere, the southernmost tip of Tamil Nadu?s worst-hit Nagapattinam district, 2,500 marshy acres close to the sea are worked for salt-making by an equal number of small manufacturers, who roughly have an acre each.

The rest of the 11,000-acre stretch is worked by two companies, the Gujarat Heavy Chemicals and the Chennai-based Chemplast Sanmar.

?The deadly tsunamis entered at a speed of 800 km an hour and washed away our salt pans in minutes, depositing much slush and silt,? Vedaratnam said.

This has crippled the over 100-year-old salt works and affected the livelihood of 10,000 families dependent on various stages of the salt-making process.

The salt pans along this narrow coastal stretch running towards Point Calimere (or Kodiyakkarai, which is Tamil for land?s end) are rich not only in salt but in history as they are associated with Mahatma Gandhi?s salt satyagraha.

When the father of the nation led the Dandi March in 1930 to defy the British ban on making salt from the sea in Gujarat, a humble ?khadi worker? down south, Sardar Vedaratnam Pillai, did the same in Vedaranyam. He took the villagers to the sea shore in defiance of the repressive salt law while C. Rajagopalachari led a salt satyagraha march to Vedaranyam.

The salt association president is Pillai?s grandson.

Vedaratnam said: ?For preparing the salt pans, which is a seasonal business, we usually require Rs 2,500 an acre. Now, after the tsunami, we will require Rs 25,000 an acre. At least to that extent, the government must compensate us even if we are not fishermen.?

He added that readying the salt pans was an elaborate process, which would take another three months if relief came quickly.

?On December 26, the tsunamis struck the shores of Kodiyakkarai between 9.15 and 9.30 am. Some half-an-hour before that, I saw flocks of birds suddenly take wing from the huge lake nearby and disappear,? said an employee at the Customs House in Kodiyakkarai.

Nearly 2,000 deer, he said, fled to safety westwards from the ?huge frothy waves that went up to 1,500 metres? because ?otherwise we would have found a number of dead deer there after the attack?.

A worker at a salt factory near the bird sanctuary had a similar tale to tell. He said that some 30 minutes before the tsunamis crashed on the shore, ?I saw an army of cows moving rapidly from the shore towards the hinterland. I could not guess why?.

?Then, flocks of a variety of birds in the lake, over 2,000 of them, suddenly began to take off skywards in groups, the likes of which we have never seen before.

?Perhaps they had a warning system to go by. We have not seen birds in any large number at Point Calimere this year,? he added.

Flamingos are the most important among the varieties of winged visitors to Point Calimere, a picturesque sanctuary and the point where the Bay of Bengal curves westwards into the Palk Strait. They come from far-off places like Iran and the Caspian Sea as also the Rann of Kutch every year. Others that flock to the sanctuary are pelicans, white ibis, grey heron, open bill stork, painted stork and little stork.