13 hours Ago
A survivor of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami has recalled the moment he was awoken by “screaming and shouting” – two decades on from one of the deadliest disasters ever recorded. Daniel Poole had been on a surfing trip to Sri Lanka when a 9.1 magnitude earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Sumatra triggered the tsunami, which claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.
When the waves crashed into his “idyllic” seaside guesthouse he had been sharing with his now wife, all Mr Poole could see was “white water and chaos”. Mr Poole, now aged 44, said: “I leapt out of bed to the window and pulled back the old bit of fabric serving as a curtain to see a great wall of white water, as tall as our single-storey building, rolling up over the wave we surfed and then crashing up the beach.” “It wouldn’t stop,” added Mr Poole, who lives in Perranporth in Cornwall.
“My wife can’t swim, so I spun around to grab her. “The very next second the wave smashed through the front wall. “The last I saw of that room was the roof dropping down on us before we were washed out through the rear wall of the building, the compound wall, across a ditch, road and 150m into the jungle before surfacing again.
“It was just white water and chaos.” Mr Poole said he and his partner managed to get out of the water after scrambling onto a pile of debris that had wrapped around a tree. He said: “I managed to throw her on the debris but I got knocked underneath it.
“Miraculously, I was flushed right through it and popped up the other side. “I climbed up to her, and we watched as all that was once a dense jungle became the sea. “Within minutes, the water stopped surging.
Then it drew back. “It didn’t stop to rest where the sea should have been. Instead, it drew back to expose the sea floor, for as far as the eye could see.
“I’ve never seen anything quite as mad as that. There was a bus on its side in a lagoon with people trapped. “It was harrowing.
” In the days that followed, Mr Poole and other tourists who had survived the tsunami worked together to reach the embassies in Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka, and return to their home countries. Approximately 230,000 people lost their lives in 14 countries across Southeast Asia and South Asia, and as far as eastern and southern Africa following the disaster. “We’d lost all our belongings and our passports so it made everything tricky – but we hadn’t lost our lives, unlike a lot of other people in that area,” Mr Poole said.
“We counted ourselves lucky and wanted to get out of the way as there was no sign of rescue and we were going to be a drain on resources.” But the return home was not an easy one, as Mr Poole recalled feeling a sense of guilt at “leaving the chaos behind”, and of even being alive. He said: “Some of the families who had been looking after us, we couldn’t find them, we couldn’t find any sign of even their building being there.
“As a surfer it took me a while to get comfortable back in the sea.” Two decades on, one of the things Mr Poole remembers most vividly was the generosity of the local people, who helped tourists such as himself with food and shelter in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. “They’d lost their income, their food security, but they still did everything they could to keep us safe and look after us,” Mr Poole said.
“It was really humbling.” Nearly two million people were left homeless and 1.7 million displaced, with inhabitants of the coastlines of Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka suffering the brunt of the devastation.
Surviving the wave and experiencing the desperate conditions of the immediate aftermath led Mr Poole to seek work in the humanitarian sector, hoping to “give back” some of the help he received when he was in need. Now an emergency co-ordinator with disaster-relief charity ShelterBox, Mr Poole said the Boxing Day tsunami had a significant impact on how NGOs and governments deal with disasters. He said: “One of the big lessons was the need for countries to invest in reducing the risk of future disasters, like warning systems.
” He added: “We’re pushing harder and harder on the messaging that there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster’. “There is a crisis, there is an event, but it’s the way that governments are set up to be able to support the people in the aftermath, or if they can prepare in advance and improve systems to make sure people are living in lower risk environment, that make a difference.” Rachel Harvey, from near Totnes in south Devon, had been working as a foreign correspondent in Jakarta, Indonesia, for about two years when the earthquake struck.
Twenty minutes later, a tsunami with waves travelling at up to 500 miles per hour crashed into the coastal city of Banda Aceh, on the island of Sumatra. Ms Harvey, now aged 59, recalled the horror she saw after travelling to Banda Aceh to cover the disaster. “We got into Aceh two days after the tsunami hit and none of us was prepared for what we witnessed,” she said.
“The first couple of days, we were around the main city – or what was left of it – of Banda Aceh, and that was apocalyptic. “Buildings completely destroyed, piles of rubble, boats in places they shouldn’t naturally have been, dead bodies everywhere..
. Things your brain is almost refusing to process. “The roads and ports were also damaged which meant that we weren’t able to see how bad things were further down the coast.
“I remember the first helicopter ride that I took with the British Army, and I was shocked all over again seeing that “That whole strip of the western coastline, for up to 2km in some cases, had just been wiped out – obliterated. “Towns, cities, villages just down to concrete foundations, mud, coconut palms on their side.” Ms Harvey, who also joined ShelterBox as a result of her experience covering the impact of the tsunami in Banda Aceh, said it was important to look back on the event 20 years on to learn from it – and hopefully improve the efficiency and quality of responses to disasters.
She said: “I saw for myself after the tsunami just how chaotic and messy a big humanitarian response can be. “The need for better co-ordination was really stark during the tsunami, and that has improved since. “The types of support offered have become much more tailored to the actual needs of the affected communities rather than assuming what has worked in one crisis will automatically work in another.
” She added: “There is also a consciousness now, though more work needs to be done, of the importance to find ways to include local organisations. “The big humanitarian sector can swing into action and, if it’s not careful, subsume everything that existed before – whereas the lesson that is always true of every disaster of whatever type is that it is the people that are impacted by that crisis who are the first responders. “They will have the best handle on what they need at the time that support is available, and we really do need to listen to them.
” Ms Harvey added that the lessons learned from the response to the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami are all the more important now that the number of people forcibly displaced around the world – a staggering 120 million – is higher than ever. She said: “There are more people displaced around the world than there ever were, in some cases by conflict, and in other cases by the effects of climate change and severe weather. “That is not going to go away.
“We need to get better at the preventive action and the planning that we can put in place, both at the local level and in policy terms at a global level, to ensure that we are as best prepared as we can – because unfortunately these crises are going to continue.”.
