 "2004 Indian Ocean tsunami: The disaster that killed more than 2 lakh people and its aftermath")
December 26, 2004, will always be etched in the annals of global history.
On this day, a powerful 9.1-magnitude earthquake off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami that killed millions of people across a dozen countries, reaching as far as East Africa.
It was an unprecedented disaster that reshaped the world’s approach to disaster planning and global unity.
Ahead of the 20th anniversary of a disaster that’s still vividly remembered in the region, here’s a look back at the aftermath.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami
It was one of modern history’s worst natural disasters .
The tsunami was triggered by the longest faultline rupture from an earthquake ever observed, seconds before 7.59 am on December 26, 2004, a Sunday after Christmas.
The gap between the India plate and the Burma microplate was at least 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) long.
It produced huge waves that were over 30 metres (100 feet) high, delivering energy equal to 23,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs and wreaking havoc.
The magnitude was initially recorded at 8.8, before the US Geological Survey shared its official magnitude of 9.1 and depth as 30 kilometres (18.6 miles).
The epicentre was about 241 kilometres (150 miles) from the coast of Sumatra.
Indonesia is a vast archipelago nation on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” which is a region of high seismic activity that stretches across the Pacific basin from Japan through Southeast Asia.
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The massive death toll
According to EM-DAT, an official global disaster database, the tsunami claimed the lives of 226,408 people in total.
After travelling around the Indian Ocean, the enormous waves struck Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka a few hours later.
When the waves reached their maximum speed, they were more than 800 kilometres per hour (500 miles per hour), which is more than twice the speed of a bullet train.
According to EM-DAT, almost 35,000 people were killed in Sri Lanka, 16,389 in India, and 8,345 in Thailand.
Indonesia’s Aceh province, located closest to the earthquake’s epicentre and with 18 of 23 districts and cities located in the coastal line in the Northern side of Sumatra, bore the brunt of the disaster with more than half of the total death toll (126,000) reported. The worst-hit areas were in Aceh Besar and Banda Aceh, according to the Aceh Disaster Management Agency.
Nearly 300 were killed in Somalia, more than 100 in the Maldives, as well as dozens in Malaysia and Myanmar.
A trail of destruction
The tsunami displaced more than 1.5 million people, mostly in the four worst-affected countries: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.
Hundreds of thousands of schools, hospitals and basic infrastructures were destroyed, leaving, in some cases, entire communities homeless.
The Tsunami and Disaster Mitigation Research Centre at Syiah Kuala University in Aceh recorded more than 1,400 wrecked schools and about 150,000 students had their education process disrupted by the destructive waves in a report published in 2019.
Many international donors and organisations poured in money to help rebuild the affected areas.
It sparked disaster relief of around $14 billion pledged from the international community, according to the United Nations.
Today, the reconstruction has transformed the worst-hit city, Banda Aceh.
More than 100,000 houses were rebuilt in the westernmost Indonesian province of Aceh alone, according to the Indonesian government. Three “escape buildings” were also constructed in a relatively safer area to accommodate thousands of people if an earthquake and tsunami strike.
Twenty years after the tsunami, the Aceh coast is brimming with residential housing, cafes and restaurants, as well as tourism support facilities, while the hills in some areas from which people are currently being mined for sand and stone.
Warning systems
The tsunami also made coastal communities in the Indian Ocean region reevaluate their level of preparedness.
There was no warning system in the Indian Ocean at the time of the earthquake.
However, 1,400 stations around the world have now reduced warning times to a few minutes after the formation of a tsunami wave.
According to experts, the impact of the 2004 disaster was amplified by the absence of a well-coordinated warning system.
Millions of dollars have been spent on tsunami warning systems, making us more prepared than ever, according to ocean scientists. However, they caution that there is no way to totally eliminate the effects of a catastrophic tsunami.
With inputs from AFP
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