Today is the 19th anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami…
Around 230,000 souls met their maker that day, no one knows for sure, making 26th December 2004 one of the deadliest days in human history. I had hoped to publish an account I made a few days after the event when the memory was still fresh, but unfortunately the document is lost in some hidden recess of my hard drive. Still, it was the type of day one does not forget and it remains perhaps, the defining experience of my life.
I do my best to make this account as accurate as possible, where my memory is unclear, I have deleted that detail regardless of how dramatic it may be. It is only in the last decade or so that I have come to enjoy beach holidays. I don’t tan well and find lying in the sun uncomfortable and boring, so it is a matter of coincidence that I found myself on a beach on Langkawi that day.
Langkawi is a Malaysian island in the Indian Ocean a few miles west of the border with Thailand and south of Phuket. To the holiday maker, Langkawi is a tropical paradise with white sand, clear blue sea and verdant jungle. I was there as part of a small group.
At the hotel party on Christmas Eve our friend’s son won a voucher for kayaking. It was for noon on the 26th. The boy was as tall as me but technically still a child so had to be accompanied by an adult so I volunteered to go along with him.
Noon came and went and the young man didn’t arrive so I started to head back to the hotel room, in a reality a chalet in the jungle, when the thought occurred to me that I had been in Langkawi for a week and had barely spent any time on the beach, so I searched for a sun lounger, but they were all taken. I was about to give up on the thought when a man got up and left so I settled on the vacated lounger. Shaded by a coconut palm parasol, I enjoyed the tropical heat, cooled by a gentle sea breeze.
I lay long enough to feel myself starting to drift off to sleep when I heard what I thought was a low-flying jet aircraft. I thought it was strange as we had been there a week and not heard any aircraft, so I got up and looked at sky and just about everyone else on the beach seemed to be doing the same thing. The sky was clear.
I heard an American voice say something about an ‘earthquake’ and thought maybe this guy is from California and knows what he was he talking about. I turned to listen to him and then I saw it, not a wall of water, but a huge swell. The plastic barrel jetty at the water sports centre buckled into the shape of a hairpin and jet skis, boats and yes, kayaks, went racing parallel to the beach at an incredible speed.
Instinct kicked in and I raced as fast as my unathletic body would carry me towards the hotel. After thirty yards or so I looked over my shoulder and everything looked ok. I started to walk back to collect my things as did a lot of people.
I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, my mind hadn’t really grasped it, but I lifted my little plastic bag that contained my T-Shirt, wallet and camera and I heard someone say, ‘It’s coming back.’ The sea, which only a few seconds before, had been a twinkling turquoise blue was now brown and resembled a raging river in flood. It was as if a giant hand had stirred the sea into a swirling broth of mud. Water began racing up the beach.
Again, it was not like a wall of water but rather like the tide coming in – in twenty seconds and not stopping Once again, I ran. It’s a cliche but it was like a Hollywood disaster movie, a crowd of panicked people running for their lives from an irresistible force.
It was as if the normal laws of physics no longer applied, the ground is meant to be here, the sea there, but that didn’t seem to be the case. A thought flashed across my mind that it was the end of the world, that I was going to die, right there and then. Bizarrely it didn’t seem too terrible a prospect.
My main feeling was one of disappointment, there was so much more I wanted to do in my life. At that moment I was living a nightmare we all have, the one where we try to run away from some terrible thing, and no matter how hard we run, we just can’t escape. I glanced over my shoulder two or three times.
The water got closer and closer, until it was maybe ten feet behind me or less. Langkawi is essentially a mountain top in the ocean. The hotel was a series of terraces on the hillside, beach, pool, main building then paths up to the chalets on the hillside.
There was a path from the beach to hotel and people were falling over each other in the scramble for safety. I opted to thrash through the foliage beside the path to get to the pool area. There I saw people lying on their loungers, bemused at the sight of terrified people sprinting past them.
The water came up to the edge of the pool patio and then stopped but I was not taking anything for granted. I moved on. A small girl, maybe six or seven was in front of me, screaming in terror, I considered picking her up but then dismissed the idea as it would slow me down.
I ran around the pool and up the path that led to the hotel reception and then, just shy of the level of the main building, stopped to catch my breath and take stock. An Australian woman with tears streaming down her face asked me what happened. I told her I didn’t know but thought there had been an earthquake and advised her to get as high up the hill as possible.
I went up the path to our chalet. It was perhaps a hundred feet, maybe a little less above sea level so I felt quite safe. I hammered on the door; my wife was slow to answer but knew from my excited state that something was wrong.
I told her there had been an earthquake. In what I now see as a funny coincidence, she was watching the DVD of the Mel Gibson film about Jesus and of course the earthquake scene following the crucifixion was on. ‘One earthquake is enough for one day,’ I declared, switching the TV off with a flourish. The phone rang.
It was our friends. They said there was something on the TV about an earthquake in Sumatra. Sumatra?
I thought, that must be hundreds of miles away. I knew then that something was very wrong indeed. I went to our friend’s cabin and watched events unfolding on one of those international news channels you only ever watch on holiday because it’s the only English language one.
Sri Lanka was mentioned. I thought that Sri Lanka was maybe a thousand miles away and said, ‘This is something massive, tens of thousands will be dead.’ Unfortunately, that was an huge underestimation. We cracked opened a bottle of whiskey, either Tyrconnell or Jameson’s, I’m not exactly sure which one, and watched the ‘results’ come in.
It reminded me of an election night but rather than votes or seats, returns of the dead came in from all over the Indian Ocean. I was so high on adrenalin the whiskey wasn’t touching the sides. I’d kill half a bottle before the afternoon was out with no discernible effects.
After a couple of hours, it occurred to me that I’d been an eye witness to history, an irony given my life-long interest in the subject so concluding the danger had passed, I announced I was going down to the beach to take a few photos. My friend’s son volunteered to go with me so we made our way down the hill. The restaurant balcony where I had Christmas lunch was gone, swept into the sea which was now a rolling soup of chairs and other debris.
On the landward side, the front-of-house staff polished down tables for the evening service. It was impressive stuff. I imagined that at home, most would have, not unreasonably, have called in sick.
The hotel security people, acting as police, had cordoned the beach area off. I asked a security man if this sort of thing happened often. He shook his head.
The main had tears in his eyes and was clearly petrified, yet he was doing his duty. By that stage I realised there had been an earthquake, a dramatic but explicable event, but a natural one all the same. I supposed in that Muslim country, the security man may have thought what he had just witnessed was the will of Allah, something far more terrifying.
The beach looked like it had been a test range for aerial bombing, everything was overturned, there were pools of water and I noticed the sea was still churning. I told my young companion to run up the hill as fast as his legs could carry him. Forewarned we were able to reach safety before the waters surged again.
That was the surprising thing. One hears of a Tsunami, but they come in clusters. I saw at least three that day and there were almost certainly others while I was watching TV.
I did get some photos of the devastation, including the debris that was swept into the mangrove swamps and trapped among the branches. The Da Vinci Code was top of the airport best sellers list at the time, and many copies lay sodden and unfinished on the sand and among the trees. That evening when the adrenalin finally wore off, I wept, out of sheer relief.
I thought of the scene in Saving Private Ryan where one of the soldiers having survived the terror of the beach, weeps when the enemy trenches were finally cleared. I also thought of the words of a friend who had been in the Hillsborough disaster. He was being crushed against the fence and survived by climbing over people to escape. ‘You’ll climb on people’s heads to get safe.’ At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant but as the thought of the crying little girl flashed through my mind, I realised that I did now.
It was not my finest moment but I am trying to recount what happened as accurately as possible The next day we were due to fly out to Kuala Lumpur. I asked at check out if anyone from the hotel had been killed and was told, ‘No’, which may be correct but as the hotel did not check with either of our rooms to see if everyone was ok, how did they know?
The only way they would know for sure was if people failed to check out. On the short coach ride to the airport the extent of the damage was clear. The Italian restaurant where we dined on Christmas eve had a pleasure boat embedded in it.
People struggled through knee-high mud to carry belongings from their ruined shacks. Some of them cast angry looks at the coachload of western tourists and I couldn’t blame them. We were flying out to safety and leaving it all behind.
They could not. The arbitrary nature of the tsunami was evidenced by how clearly the damage was delineated. One side of the road looked like Hiroshima after the bomb and the other was completed untouched.
I subsequently learned that topography was the key. The shores off Langkawi are steep with deep water only a few metres off shore. The tidal rush was stopped by a modest rise in the ground.
In places with a flat shoreline, the water went inland for miles, Sri Lanka being one. The event shook me for a few years. I had intermittent nightmares for a while but the noise, a giant scraping sound of sand and rocks being ripped from the ocean floor has stayed with me.
The only way I can describe it is like being inside a drive-through car wash with a jet engines roaring outside. I watched the Ewen McGregor and Naomi Watts movie about the tsunami, ‘The Impossible’ which was pretty accurate but the one thing it didn’t get right was the noise. It didn’t come close.
I knew I had dodged a bullet, Malaysia in general and Langkawi in particular got off relatively lightly, in terms of tourist areas, Sri Lanka and Phuket were clobbered, but all that was small beer compared the epicentre at Banda Aceh were the damage and deaths was truly apocalyptic. Nowadays, I rarely think about it. I know that many people reading this will have endured their own horrific experiences but that day made me realise how fragile life is.
One can be in what seems a perfectly safe and idyllic setting without a care in the world and be dead a few seconds later with little or no warning. I thought I was going to die and yet that moment was somehow serene. The truly shocking thing is how the deaths of hundreds of thousands barely impacted upon the wider world.
Joe Biden going into hospital with Covid would probably have a much bugger impact on global financial markets as most of those who died had no life or property insurance. The supply of no vital commodity or market was affected. Indonesia put the economic cost at £4.5 billion or 2.2% of the nation’s GDP.[1] By point of comparison, the National Audit Office put the cost of the failed UK test and trace app for Covid, at GBP25.7 billion with a total lifetime cost of GBP29.3 billion.
The human cost of course can never be measured.
Hundreds of thousands, including many entire families and communities, were washed off the face of the earth, lost forever in the flood.
