On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra caused huge waves that swept across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries in the Indian Ocean, with victims as far away as Somalia. At their maximum speed, the surges traveled at nearly 800 km/h and reached heights of up to 30 meters.
In the Indonesian province of Aceh, where more than 100,000 people were killed, the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque kicked off a series of commemorations across Asia, with a three-minute-long siren at the exact time of the disaster, followed by prayers.
People sat and cried at the Ulee Lheue mass grave, where around 14,000 tsunami victims are buried, while some villages held their own prayers across the province in memory of the tragedy that devastated communities whole.
“I don’t have the words”
In Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, Indonesians will be able to visit a larger mass grave and a night prayer will be held at the Grand Mosque. Other religious ceremonies and beach vigils are to be held in Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.
“I thought it was the end of the world,” says Hasnawati, a 54-year-old teacher at the mosque. “One Sunday morning, while our family was laughing together, a disaster struck and everything disappeared. I have no words.”
In Thailand, where half of the more than 5,000 deaths were foreign tourists, commemorations began early in Ban Nam Khem, the country's worst-hit village. Tearful relatives of the victims laid flowers and wreaths in front of a curved wall in the shape of a tsunami wave, on which plaques bearing the victims' names are affixed.
In total, the tsunami killed 226,408 people, according to EM-DAT, a recognized global disaster database. The most affected area was the north of the island of Sumatra, where more than 120,000 people died out of a total of 165,708 deaths in Indonesia.
“Devastated by the loss of a child”
“I hope we never experience something like this again,” says Nilawati, a 60-year-old Indonesian who lost her son and mother in the tsunami. “I learned how devastated one can be by the loss of a child, a suffering that cannot be explained with words,” she breathes. “It feels like it happened yesterday.”
According to experts, the absence of a properly coordinated warning system in 2004 worsened the consequences of the disaster. Since then, some 1,400 stations around the world have reduced warning times after the formation of a tsunami to just a few minutes.
The earthquake released energy equivalent to 23,000 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
In Thailand, at a hotel in Phang Nga province, an exhibition on the tsunami has been set up and a documentary is to be broadcast, while government and UN officials are to speak on disaster preparedness.
In Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people have lost their lives, relatives of victims and survivors must board the Ocean Queen Express train towards Peraliya (90 km south of Colombo), where wagons had been swept away, leaving around 1000 dead. Religious ceremonies, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim, must also be organized across the island.
The waves also reached Africa, killing 300 people in Somalia, but also more than a hundred in the Maldives.
