Boxing Day tsunami survivors from Cornwall recall 'one of the deadliest disasters'
Daniel Poole, on a surf trip in Sri Lanka 20 years ago, said all he could see was 'white water and chaos'
Boxing Day tsunami survivors from Cornwall are recalling 'one of the deadliest disasters' 20 years on.
The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami remains one of the deadliest sudden onset emergencies in modern history, killing nearly a quarter of a million people. Nearly two million people were left homeless and over 2.5 million people were affected across 14 countries.
A survivor of the tsunami on 26 December 2004 has recalled the moment he was awoken by "screaming and shouting".
Daniel Poole, from Perranporth, 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"
"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."
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."
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.
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.
"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."
Whole communities were devastated. People on the nearest coastlines of Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka faced the brunt of the destruction. People lost loved ones, homes, and livelihoods. People as far away as Somalia, the Seychelles and South Africa were affected.
The tsunami was triggered by a ‘megathrust earthquake’ measuring 9.1 magnitude. It struck at 8am in the morning and remains the third most powerful earthquake recorded. It caused a 1,200km section of the earth’s crust to shift beneath the Indian Ocean.
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.
Walls of water, reaching 20m in height, made landfall in parts of Aceh, Indonesia. The tsunami travelled at speeds of up to 800km per hour. In some places, the waves spread 3km inland, carrying debris and seawater with them. They devastated everything they hit, and retreating waters eroded whole shorelines.
ShelterBox was founded in 2000, so we were a relatively new and small charity when the tsunami hit in 2004, making the disaster one of their largest responses.
The Cornwall-based charity packed and sent thousands of boxes of aid from our then headquarters in Helston, Cornwall. Each box was filled with a tent, toolkit, ground sheet, water filter, and mosquito net. As well as kitchen pots and pans, hats and gloves.
We started with 200 boxes, working closely with Rotary in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives to get emergency shelter and essential aid to affected families.
For the first time in our history, we recruited ShelterBox volunteers to travel with our boxes and distribute them.
We appealed for blue-light staff – firefighters and healthcare workers – and within days we had a team of four ready to travel to Sri Lanka. With the help of local volunteers, the newly formed ShelterBox volunteers began distributing boxes to people who needed them most.
The response changed the way we worked. These were the first ShelterBox Response Team (SRT) volunteers. They are now an established and essential part of ShelterBox responses around the world.
Our work supporting people after the tsunami was only possible because of a massive surge of support from people wanting to donate or volunteer to support
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