Why no one was prepared for the deadliest tsunami in history
In 2004, an earthquake in the Indian Ocean released energy equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima type atomic bombs. 20 years later, we examine the disaster and its toll.
On December 26, 2004, hotel cleaner Supharat Srilao was at home with her three-year-old son in Khao Lak, Thailand. Their house was near the ocean. At around 10:30 in the morning, she noticed something strange: “a black wave coming from the sea,” she recalls.
“As I held my kid…the wave reached us, and we heard a boom. I saw the wave come over us. My child was swept away from me. The wave pulled me under. Then I prayed to my ancestors. ‘I must survive, I must survive.’ I thought, ‘I must survive to find my son.’”
Srilao’s story isn’t unique among the millions impacted by the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The tsunami, the deadliest in recorded history, killed more than 225,000 people, primarily in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.
Twenty years later, the legacy of the tsunami looms large, and it is now the subject of National Geographic’s new docuseries Tsunami: Race against Time.
(TSUNAMI: RACE AGAINST TIME premieres across two nights, beginning Nov. 24 at 9/8c on National Geographic; All episodes stream Nov. 25 on Disney+ and Hulu)
What made this natural disaster so destructive––and what are communities doing to prepare for the next one?
Lack of preparation set the stage for disaster
Tsunamis occur when a geologic shift disrupts the ocean, causing a series of large waves that surge toward land. Usually, earthquakes under the ocean floor are to blame, but events like landslides and volcanic eruptions can also trigger them.
The Pacific Ocean’s so-called “Ring of Fire,” an area with high seismic activity, sees 80 percent of the world’s tsunamis.
Though humans can’t prevent tsunamis, they can mitigate the disaster’s worst effects by preparing for them. The first effort to track tsunamis began in 1941, when authorities in Japan established the Sendai Local Meteorological Observatory. When they observed signs of tsunamis, they used local radio stations to issue warnings.
Today, internationally-managed detection systems measure water levels and sound the alarm around the Pacific Ocean, giving authorities time to evacuate coastal areas when a tsunami might be approaching.
There was no such system in place to protect the 1.5 billion people who live in small towns and coastal cities around the Indian Ocean, the world’s third largest basin. Tsunamis aren’t a part of everyday life in the region, and they’re rarely fatal. Between 1852 and 2002, only seven of the 50 recorded tsunamis in the Indian Ocean resulted in loss of life, and the combined total of casualties over this 150-year period was under 50,000.
Because of this, tsunami responses were not implemented around the Indian Ocean as they have been in places like Japan, where students undergo regular tsunami evacuation drills and buildings are constructed to withstand earthquakes that precede tsunamis.
A massive underwater earthquake triggered a tsunami
Sumatra in Indonesia sits near the junction between two tectonic plates: the Indian plate and the Burman microplate. On December 26, 2004, these plates crashed together under the ocean floor, producing a massive 9.1-magnitude earthquake at 7:29 a.m.
“The energy released by this earthquake was so huge that it had to have been slowly building up for hundreds of years. [It was] an energy equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima type atomic bombs,” says seismologist Barry Hirshorn. The power and size of the quake actually altered the earth’s polar motion by around an inch, a shift that shortened days by 2.68 microseconds.
“An earthquake that occurs under the ocean actually lifts the ocean bottom. Imagine a line of 1,000 km (621.4 mi) of water being lifted vertically, and then the water, of course, peaks, and then gravity pulls it down,” Hirschorn explains. “As you get near a coast, you’re not going to see what we think of as ocean waves. I think of it more like a steamroller of water just shearing its way inland.”
The tsunami turned land into sea
In Indonesia’s Aceh province, it was just after 8:00 a.m. when people poured out of homes and buildings to survey the damage from the earthquake. Then, they saw another disaster hurtling toward them: Twenty minutes after the earthquake hit, a series of waves as high as 167 feet began slamming into the coast, bulldozing trees, turning streets into rapids, and sweeping people away.
Over the next several hours, giant waves raced at 500 miles per hour––nearly the cruising speed of a jet––across the Indian Ocean. Two hours after the earthquake, they reached Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India. Hours later, the tsunami flooded parts of Africa.
For people on the ground, the experience was horrific. Sixteen-year-old British tourist Louis Mullan was vacationing with his parents and younger brother Theo in Khao Lak, Thailand, when the wave hit and separated the family. Someone pulled Louis to safety.
“I remember the view, the pure carnage of rushing water,” he recalls. “I was looking out back towards the sea, but there was no sort of line where the sea finished. The water was everywhere. And I just screamed out. The only thing I could do. I screamed out for my mum and dad and Theo, and just heard nothing.”
The scale of devastation was staggering
Banda Aceh, the biggest city in Aceh, suffered significant losses from the tsunami, which killed a quarter of its population. Lhoknga, a coastal town southwest of Banda Aceh, fared even worse––a 100-foot wave slammed into the town. The tsunami completely leveled the community, whose population collapsed from 7,000 people to just 400.
The tsunami had a domino effect of devastation. In Sri Lanka, the tsunami created the worst rail disaster in history when it threw a train off its tracks, killing around 1,700 people.
Eranthie Mendis was on the train with her mother. Their carriage filled with water and then tumbled over, trapping everyone inside. Though Mendis was able to squeeze through a window and pull other passengers to safety, her mother was trapped in the chaos.
“At some point then the water levels receded,” she remembers. “I found my mother fairly quickly.”
She was dead. “I took her wedding ring and kissed her, and I told my Umi that I’ll be back for her, and then we left. We left her on the train.”
The disaster impacted countries far from the Indian Ocean, since, like the Mullan family, thousands of tourists from Europe and the United States had traveled there for winter vacation. Sweden, for example, lost almost 550 citizens who had been vacationing in the region; another 1,500 were injured.
The world was fundamentally transformed. “Around 1.8 million people displaced. Around 460,000 homes damaged or destroyed. Even a decade on, many of those figures are still semi-provisional. It was just too big to ever assess the full truth,” wrote journalist Chris McCall in The Lancet on December 13, 2014.
The tsunami inspired global action
The world responded swiftly. The United Nations created a relief fund that raised $6.25 billion. Though the fund aimed to help 14 countries, the vast majority of it went to Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the hardest hit places.
The recovery process also included plans to mitigate the impact of future natural disasters. Countries had lacked a warning system when the 2004 tsunami hit, and they quickly course corrected. In 2005, the IOC helped establish the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System to detect the early signs of tsunamis and quickly alert local communities in 27 countries.
In the years since, upgraded warning systems have been installed in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans as well, ensuring that communities have more time to get to higher ground when a tsunami barrels toward land.
Governments and non-governmental organizations have also invested in programs to educate local communities about what to do in the event of a tsunami so that they will know how to respond.
Though they are too late for the 2004 disaster, these programs will hopefully spare people what Supharat Srilao experienced: the sight of a giant wave ripping her child from her arms.
After making it out of the water, she and her husband spent the next several days searching for their lost child, not knowing if he was dead or alive. Finally, on the third day, her husband found him, safe and sound.
“It was a real miracle,” she says.
The families of the tsunami’s 225,000 victims weren’t so lucky. But with new preparedness plans in place, people throughout the Indian Ocean will have a better chance at survival when the next tsunami hits.
