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It was just before 8am on Sunday 26 December 2004 when the earthquake struck. Abdul Rahem, 47, a fisher, was strolling along the beach, enjoying the morning breeze near to his home in Lam Awe, a sleepy fishing village on the coast of Aceh in Indonesia. He retreated to paddy fields when the violent shaking and swinging stopped. But it wasn’t until he heard the cries of neighbours that he realised something was seriously wrong. People were shouting: “The water is coming.”
Rahem raced home to get his elderly father, and supported him as they tried to flee along the broken road, which had been twisted and torn by the quake. His father urged him to go ahead and leave him, but Rahem refused. “I said, ‘No, no, no, if we die, we die together.’”
It was then that the water came. First a smaller wave surged rapidly into the village, then a much taller onslaught of water. The waves were as high as 30 metres. “The first thing that flashed into my head was, is this the end of the world?”
Rahem’s efforts to save his father were in vain. Both his parents and his three siblings died in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Rahem was swept away, but managed to reach the surface and catch his breath. He grabbed hold of a wooden cabinet, though it was soon shattered as the force of the water slammed him into a coconut tree. He remembers seeing the minaret of a mosque in the distance as he rolled away.
He was eventually swept to the foot of a hill, where survivors gathered. He could hear the voice of someone trapped, crying for help, but was unable to reach them. From the top, all he could see was rubble – trees ripped from the earth and the metal roofs blown from homes. His village had been flattened.
The tsunami that struck on that December morning 20 years ago was one of “biblical proportions”, says Bernardo Aliaga, the head of tsunami resilience for Unesco. More than 225,000 people were killed, including 170,000 in Aceh, making it the deadliest tsunami in history. Casualties were recorded in 15 countries across south and south-east Asia, east and southern Africa and in the Indian Ocean.
There was no warning given to communities in Aceh, and many people in the worst-affected areas had no idea what was happening. It was, says Aliaga, “a wake-up call for the entire world on the tsunami hazard”. The question still hanging in the air today, 20 years on, is: if something this big, this destructive, hit the world again, are we better prepared and would more people survive?
When the 2004 tsunami struck, there was no warning system in place in the Indian Ocean. Over the past two decades, huge efforts have been made to develop ways to monitor tsunami risks, share information across borders and relay warnings as rapidly as possible.
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From left: Susanti, 46; Agus Salim, 49; and Daivina Salim, 22, on the motorbike that took them to safety. Photograph: Riska Munawarah/the Guardian
Now there are three early-warning centres operating day and night, monitoring data that is relayed in real time, including from seismological monitors: one in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, one based across Melbourne and Canberra, Australia, and one in Hyderabad, India.
No one knows the importance of early-warning systems and informed communities more than the people of Aceh.
Augus Salim, 49, was at home with his pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter, in the village of Deah Glumpang, a 20-minute drive from Rahem’s house, when the earthquake stopped. He had dashed out on his motorbike, taking his wife and daughter to his mother’s house, and drove to a nearby bridge, the highest point in the village, to look around the area. As he looked out towards the coast he saw the sea was retreating rapidly into the ocean, exposing beneath it stretches of sands.
Salim had worked for a foreign shipping agency, and so was one of the few people locally who recognised what was happening. “I still remember I was screaming at people around me, but they were still calm, they weren’t panicking yet. I was driving my motorcycle and screaming, ‘the water from the sea will rise’,” says Salim. “They were thinking, what is wrong with this guy?”
Salim rushed back to his mother’s house, piled his pregnant wife and daughter, Dhaivina, then two years old, on to their motorbike. He told his mother everyone else must also leave, urgently.
“They already took the motorcycle, they were ready to go,” Salim says of his brother and mother. Yet it was the last time he saw them. Salim’s wife, Susanti, 46, also lost her mother, father and nine of her siblings.
Today, Deah Glumpang is one of 22 communities in Indonesia certified as tsunami-ready under a scheme rolled out under Unesco. This means evacuation maps have been created for the community, and signs installed for evacuation routes, while local officials have gathered information on the number of people at risk in tsunami hazard zones and developed a community emergency response plan. Drills are held once or twice a year, though they were paused during the pandemic.
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Clockwise from top left: Salihin at home in his kitchen; the escape building in Alue Deah Teungoh village, Banda Aceh; fishing boats at Ulee Lheue; and a tsunami-damaged house remains abandoned in Alue Deah Teungoh. Photographs: Riska Munawarah/the Guardian
Such actions should be mandatory in all affected communities, says Salihin (who goes by one name), a former community leader in Deah Glumpang who lives across the street from Salim. “We should teach them what to do if a disaster happens. What to do, where to go, where is the escape building? We should know our area very well,” he says. Religious leaders should be involved in sharing information, and local people offered incentives to encourage them to take part in drills, he says.
Education programmes have to be consistent, he adds. While local government and NGOs initiated many disaster preparedness programmes in local schools in the years after the tsunami, research suggests these have tapered off, with schools citing a lack of funding.
Back in Jakarta’s early-warning centre, staff sit in rows observing data that flashes across giant screens at the front of their monitoring room. The information is being relayed from seismological monitors across the region. As they work, a bell sounds, and a robotic voice interrupts the room: “Attention, attention: earthquake detected six minutes ago. Mariana Islands region. Magnitude 5.0, depth 10km. Please check interactive system.” This event isn’t a cause for concern, but if the magnitude had been higher – more than six – details would be sent to an observation terminal, which maps possible scenarios. If there is a risk of a tsunami, a warning must be issued within less than three minutes of the alert.
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An official checks his phone for an SMS alert at Indonesia’s Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysics agency (BMKG) in Jakarta during an earthquake and tsunami early warning test run. Photograph: Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images
“We are quite confident that the facility has been improved, not only in Indonesia nationally, but in the Indian Ocean,” says Prof Dwikorita Karnawati, the director of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics agency, which runs the centre.
But she admits there are still gaps in the system. Indonesia relies heavily on seismological monitors, which can only be placed on land – a problem in areas of the archipelago where there are fewer small islands, such as south of Java. The further away a monitor is from the epicentre of an earthquake, the less precise the modelling and warnings will be.
Detecting earthquakes caused by non-seismological factors, such as underwater landslides or certain weather events, is also difficult, she adds: “That’s not only a challenge for Indonesia. It is a global challenge.”
In the long term, Karnawati hopes networks of underwater cables will provide better monitoring. “What we need is the sensor, which is placed at the bottom of the ocean and close to the source of the tsunami.” The challenge is developing technology that can be placed thousands of metres deep in the ocean, she says, adding that Indonesia is coordinating with researchers in the US.
Greater efforts are also needed to educate at-risk communities about the dangers of tsunamis and what to do if one strikes, Karnawati says. “That’s the last challenge.”
A UN target has said that all communities at risk of tsunamis must be prepared by 2030. Some villages, such as Salim’s, have been certified as tsunami-ready. “But there are still thousands [more],” says Karnawati.
In Rahem’s village, Lam Awe, a siren is tested on the 26th day of every month and there are three evacuation routes to the mountainous areas. Rahem is not aware of any practice drills held locally, he says.
Now married with three daughters, Rahem says his children are educated about tsunami risks at school. “It’s good, because it’s close to them,” he says. The village is right on the coastline.
As a fisher, he had to move back to his village after the Boxing Day tsunami. “If someone asked us to live in the mountains, we’d have nothing, no way to live,” he says. He came back months after the disaster, living first in a temporary shelter, with only candles and paraffin to provide light at night.
“I know exactly where [the evacuation routes are] but the problem is when it suddenly happens like that,” he says. It’s easier to remember which steps to follow when you’re not racing to save your family’s life.
Rahem does not feel any kind of fear, he says. But memories of his parents are often in his thoughts. “When I remember my parents, my family, it feels like it happened two days ago or two months ago. It’s like a split second.”
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