Twenty years after the deadliest tsunami in history, the survivors and relatives of the victims are preparing to celebrate its memory tomorrow, 26 December, the same day in 2004 in which gigantic waves hit the coasts of the countries bordering the Indian Ocean, killing over 220 thousand people.
A 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent huge waves crashing across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries in the Indian Ocean, causing casualties as far away as Somalia. At maximum speed, the waves reached 800 kilometers per hour and a maximum height of 30 metres, equivalent to a 10-storey building.
In total, the tsunami killed 226,408 people, according to Em-Dat, an accredited global disaster database. Religious ceremonies and vigils will be held throughout the region on the beaches, where many Western tourists who came to celebrate Christmas under the sun have also lost their lives. More than 5,000 people have died in Thailand, half of them foreign tourists, and another 3,000 are still missing.
An exhibition on the tsunami has been set up at a hotel in Phang Nga province and a documentary will be shown, while government and UN officials will talk about disaster prevention and management. December 26, 2004 also marked a turning point on this aspect given that, according to experts, the lack, at the time, of a properly coordinated warning system, enormously aggravated the consequences of the disaster.
Since then, around 1,400 monitoring stations around the world have reduced the warning times after the formation of a tsunami to just a few minutes. The earthquake generated waves even more than 30 meters high, like a 10-storey building, which, at maximum speed, reached 800 kilometers per hour, releasing an energy equivalent to 23,000 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
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