Today marks 20 years since a 9.2-9.3 magnitude earthquake set off a tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
More than 200,000 people were killed in the natural disaster – most of them in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.
While communities have been rebuilt, survivors are still haunted by the scenes of devastation and lives lost.
“It was like a very, very tall wall of mist, like dust covering the whole area. It filled up the sky as I watched from here,” survivor Banlue Choosin said.
The waves were up to 30 metres in some parts, smashing into the coast at the speed of a jet plane.
Choosin’s village in southern Thailand was destroyed.
“I didn’t know what was happening. While I was floating in the water, all I thought about was, ‘Everybody in the village is going to die’… But I survived.”
Charlotte Glennie reported for 1News from Thailand in the wake of the disaster.
She was among the first news crews to reach Khao Lak in Phang Nga province, the worst-hit part of Thailand.
“On reaching the coast, it was absolutely shocking – the scale of the destruction,” Glennie said.
“We went straight to Patong Beach and the wall of water that had come in was as high as 10 metres, by some accounts – that’s as high as a two-, three-storey building.”
Glennie said her strongest memory from her time on the ground in Thailand was hundreds of bodies lining the temples which had been set up as temporary morgues.
“These beautiful, spiritual Buddhist Thai temples that I’d been to before as a tourist and there were hundreds of bodies laid out on the ground.”
Former police commissioner Mike Bush arrived in Phuket to scenes of utter destruction. (Source: 1News)
With no proper warning system in place, communities were caught off-guard.
“One of the big things in those early days is that people had no idea what a tsunami [was] – some people didn’t even know the word ‘tsunami’ and people had no idea that the ocean could do this,” Glennie explained.
“Nothing like this had happened in modern history, especially on this scale.
“It was just a wasteland.”
Former World Vision aid worker Heather MacLeod was on the ground providing support for children and families in Aceh in Indonesia, near the quake’s epicentre, in the wake of the disaster.
“It was the most challenging event I think I’d been to, and I’d been to warzones and stuff before, but it was just the size of it that I think threw me,” she said.
She said it was clear the children and families were in need of psychological support “as much as they needed the physical support”.
“They were pretty used to living with very little but that psychological impact of [a quarter of a million people dying].
“It was a lot of people and a lot of grief.”
MacLeod said she’s noticed significant improvements in disaster preparedness and mitigation in the ensuing decades.
“So, putting in mangroves to reduce the risk of impact of tsunamis – you can’t control it, but there are things that can reduce the risk a bit; helping people think if you get a tsunami warning, what do you do,” she said.
“There’s been a significant change in how people are talking about disaster preparedness – that was not there before, as far as I can recall.”
In Thailand’s Phang Nga province, residents are encouraged to have ‘grab bags’ with essentials.
Choosin said while he’s confident in his community’s preparedness, he often monitors the sea for signs of the next big wave.
