BURNLEY man CHRISTIAN FRASER, a BBC Radio Five Live reporter, has returned from covering the harrowing aftermath of the tsunami in Banda Aceh, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It was one of the worst tsunami-hit areas. Here, he gives a first hand account of the devastation left behind, and the way survivors are trying to cope

NADIA Alfata greeted me the way I would an old friend in Blackburn or Burnley town centre.

Aged 23, all Nadia had left were the clothes she is standing in. I met her at Aceh's airport. Along with thousands of other people, she was now a refugee.

Everything she ever owned had gone, swept into oblivion by a giant tidal wave she and thousands of others had no time to prepare for.

She lost 30 members of her family, but her story isn't unique. There are thousands like her, and the Indonesian authorities are now trying to disperse the displaced by moving those with relatives elsewhere in Indonesia out of Aceh.

As she waited to board the Hercules transport plane and leave this scene of devastation, she talked incredibly calmly about what she has been through, and as though she had known me for years.

When I asked her how she has managed to cope, she simply told me: "I have no tears left."

Whether this was true, or whether she simply hadn't managed to face up what she has been through, only she knows. But in the face of such adversity, the people have picked themselves up and trying to get on with life.

Our driver had also lost relatives.

It was as though getting on with normal life was helping them to cope. There was no bitterness because everyone had suffered so support was all around and there was a will to get on. But the challenge ahead of them seemed to get worse every day.

It took days for the aid to start, and the true death toll will never be known.

Standing on the beach, as I did, and looking towards the town and it was as though it has been wiped off the face of the earth.

There was the odd building, but everything else was rubble. When British government minister Hilary Benn came, he said it was like looking at the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Two things struck me when I stood on the beach.

First came the smell, which many described as the smell of death hanging in the air. It was true. Under every mound of rubble were bodies waiting to be found.

Identifying the bodies was a task abandoned long ago. There were tens of thousands of bodies waiting to be found. The smell was everywhere.

Then, after the smell, I noticed the noise, or the lack of it. Wherever I had been in the past - Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, The Congo, there had always been noise. But there was silence. So much had died. Villages had simply gone. And the survivors knew they were lucky, but they lived in fear of another tsunami.

The first one struck without any warning , so much so that rumours of an after-shock - normal after a tremor - spread like wildfire. I was out recording when one such rumour began, and there was hysteria. People just ran. Cars set off, people were knocked into ditches as everyone tried to escape the killer wave they thought was heading their way.

When you have seen the damage done to the living victims, those in the hospitals, you can't begin to imagine what sort of force could cause such injury. There are severed arms, hands, legs.

Television pictures don't even begin to tell the whole story.

No words I, as a radio journalist, use can come close to summing this up. Horrific, huge, massive, shocking, awful. These words don't even scratch the surface.

Simple things demonstrated the sheer force of the water which wiped this place from the map. Ships marooned in the middle of town, large fish on roads a mile from shore, boats on top of cars and cars on top of boats, cars up trees - people unable to work out where their homes used to be.

One teacher I met had spent a week looking at one site and then realised he hadn't even got the right area. Every landmark he had grown used to had gone.

When I walked around, I had to watch where I put my feet. I don't want to stand on a corpse. And the rivers were full of bodies - the heat and sun taking their toll.

These people, many of them children, will never be identified. Their final resting place will be a mass grave. The scale of the task is summed up by a story a colleague recounted. When the BBC hired the house, there was a corpse rotting outside.

My colleagues told the Indonesians about the body and they were politely told it would be removed as soon as possible. It took three days - they had been that busy.

The kids walked around looking dazed and confused. I dread the effect that seeing all these bodies will have on them as the grow up. There simply weren't enough body bags to go around.

Corpses were wrapped up in anything and then buried - a mammoth task.

And even as people were trying to start again, fate continued to conspire against them. The airport - the only way to get aid in - was shut for a day after a plane hit a cow on the runway.

Eventually, it was cleared, but not before the delay had claimed more lives. The people of Banda Aceh are trying to start again, and the world is trying to help them.

But I don't believe we'll ever know the full scale of the tragedy, or grasp the horror they went through.