This Thursday, December 26, marks the 20th anniversary of the tsunami that caused about 230,000 dead in fourteen countries and caused the displacement of 1.6 million people from their homes. A powerful 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami that was felt as far away as East Africa.
The waves reached 30 meters in height and traveled at a speed of between 500 and 1,000 kilometers per hour, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters of modern times and the most devastating tsunami in history. It occurred exactly one year after the 2003 Iran earthquake and exactly two years before the 2006 Hengchun earthquake.
The United States Geological Survey estimates that the quake released energy equivalent to 23,000 nuclear bombs like the one dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945. In the three months after the earthquake, more than 500 aftershocks were recorded with magnitudes between 5 and more than 8.
The tsunami, known to the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, caused material damage worth $14 billion (13.23 billion euros, at the current exchange rate), according to a World Bank report.
Indonesia suffered the biggest punishment
Indonesia was the hardest hit: coastal towns disappeared swept away by the waves. In the province of Aceh, in the north of the island of Sumatra, few of its four million inhabitants did not lose a family member or a friend that day.
Located closer to the epicenter of the earthquake and with 18 of its 23 districts and cities on the coastline of the northern side of Sumatra, it bore the brunt of the disaster. More than half of the total reported deaths were recorded in Aceh.
Were about 167,000 dead in Indonesiaof which around 21% represents the number of missing people and who were never heard from again. Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, was left in ruins and presented a desolate landscape to those who entered with humanitarian assistance, with demolished houses everywhere, boats in the streets and dead people everywhere.
The western coast of Aceh suffered the most, off whose coast the strong earthquake that caused the tsunami was located and where the waves hit hardest. Only those people who were hundreds of meters away were saved inland.
“I have never witnessed anything like this. It’s incredible”expressed former US President George Bush Sr. when, accompanied by Bill Clinton, he visited ‘ground zero’ to assess the needs.
How the sea ended everything
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A few minutes before eight in the morning the 9.1 earthquake hit. One hour and forty minutes later the Andaman Sea, which bathes the Thai coast, receded a hundred meters and five minutes later the first tsunami hit, with waves of up to seven meters. Twenty minutes later, the second round arrived, with waves of up to ten meters, and a third attempt, with waves of five meters, finished off seventeen minutes later. This is what ‘The Impossible’, JA Bayona’s film based on the story of María Belón’s family, told.
Sri Lanka, Thailand, Maldives, Malaysia…
But not everything was suffered in Indonesia. In Sri Lanka authorities estimated that about 35,000 died or they disappeared; while in India more than 16,000 people died. In the six provinces of Thailand that were affected, some 8,200 people lost their lives, among them almost 2,000 foreigners, mainly of Swedish and German nationality.
Besides, There were 108 fatalities in Maldives; 75, in Malaysia; 60 in Burma (although the opposition to the military junta spoke of up to ten times more); and 2 in Bangladesh.
One hundred times more money than the ‘Live Aid’ of 1985
After the disaster, thousands of people had to relocate to start over. Many donors and international organizations contributed money to help rebuild the affected areas that they lost schools, hospitals and basic infrastructurewith stronger structures than before the tsunami.
The Tsunami and Disaster Mitigation Research Center at Syiah Kuala University in Aceh estimates, for example, that more than 1,400 schools were destroyed. Due to the disaster, some 150,000 students had to interrupt their studies, according to a report published in 2019.
The international community mobilized 13.5 billion dollars (12.8 billion euros) to support the response to the damage caused, according to Oxfam data. Efe says that this amount was one hundred times more than the money made with ‘Live Aid’ in 1985, when artists like Madonna, David Bowie and Freddy Mercury came together in a mega-festival to fight against hunger in Africa.
The tsunami was one of the reasons why the The UN tripled the total donations handled around the globeafter which there was a five-year decline in the financial capacity of the multilateral organization for its humanitarian operations around the world.
Commemoration, tourism and recovery
The aftermath of the tsunami is still visible throughout the province. He Aceh Tsunami Museumin Banda Aceh, houses photos of the aftermath and remains of vehicles, a constant reminder of what was lost that day. Local authorities have also converted a floating power plant that the tsunami swept about 6 kilometers inland into another memorial place. Both places have become the most popular tourist destinations in the area.
But development never stops. AP reports that, 20 years after the tsunami, the coast of Aceh is full of residential housing, cafes and restaurants, as well as tourist support facilities, while in some areas sand and stone are being extracted from the hills.
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