Remembering the Indian Ocean tsunami

Abstract

Tsunami survivors in Banda Aceh are still selling corn by the roadside to make a few rupiah. A few metres away are temporary lodgings where they have been for nearly a decade. Aid handouts stopped long ago. Mention the tsunami that killed around 220 000 people around the Indian Ocean to the Achenese, and many of them still collapse in tears. All the foreign aid agencies have gone. The tsunami of Dec 26, 2004, is retreating into history. These people will live with it for the rest of their lives. There is a tsunami museum in Banda Aceh now, but few locals visit it. It is just too painful to re-live all over again. The people of Indonesia’s Aceh province are a proud people, proud of their history as a Muslim sultanate that resisted Dutch invaders for 70 years in colonial times. In 2004, a separatist war was raging for independence from Indonesia. The massive 9·1 magnitude earthquake that triggered up to seven massive destructive waves, some as high as a two-storey building, brought them to their knees. The epicentre was just off the coast in the Indian Ocean and the earthquake was heard like a bomb going off . Apart from Indonesia, the most lives lost were in Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand, but the eff ects were felt and deaths recorded as far away as Somalia and South Africa. The figures are staggering. Around 1·8 million people displaced. Around 460 000 homes damaged or destroyed. Even a decade on, many of those figures are still semi-provisional. It was just too big to ever assess the full truth. Since then, a lot of effort and money has gone into ensuring such a mega-disaster is not repeated. As of 2009, pledges were put at around US$13·6 billion. One day the world will fi nd out if it was enough. The chances of another tsunami disaster hitting the Indian Ocean in the future are 100%. It is just a matter of when and where. In 2012, two strong earthquakes hit Banda Aceh on the same day, and rather than fl eeing to the purpose-built tsunami refuges that now dot the city’s shoreline, residents panicked and fl ed in droves to the city centre. There were traffi c jams and accidents. The tsunami that day was tiny, but seismologists say the earthquakes were strong enough to generate a much larger one.