On Boxing Day, 2004...
...at 7.58am,
an earthquake of 9.1 magnitude
struck beneath the Indian Ocean...
Greg, Greg!
...triggering one of the biggest tsunamis in recorded history.
That wave is a good 15-20 feet tall.
Waves flattened coastal towns across Southeast Asia.
Within 24 hours, the tsunami had claimed
over a quarter of a million lives,
including those of 149 Brits.
I'm Dr Xand van Tulleken.
And, as a medic, I've witnessed many disasters first-hand.
To make sense of what happened in this one, I'm following
the progress of the devastating wave minute-by-minute.
I'll be meeting those who were there
to piece together exactly what happened.
As the water came, it was basically consuming everything in its path.
I'm Raksha Dave, and I'll be investigating
why the earthquake and tsunami were so destructive.
Whoa!
Masses of material, there's, like, cars and bits of wood.
I'm not sure how people would survive in this.
That Hollywood image of the huge wall of water crashing down...
...often not the reality.
This time, we reveal what happened as the tsunami neared the end
of its 500 mile-an-hourjourney around the world
over 24 hours after it began.
We discover how advanced technology was used to get help to people.
Find out how fishing boats at sea survived when the tsunami hit.
And Luke Simon continues the search for his brother.
I didn't really want to look to see if Piers might be in there,
but I thought, you know, he could be in all of that.
This is the tragic story of the Boxing Day Tsunami.
It was now eight hours since a giant earthquake under the Indian Ocean
had triggered a massive tsunami.
And the enormous wave was still on the move.
First, it battered the town of Banda Aceh.
Now, that's here at the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
And that's not far from the epicentre of the earthquake,
around here.
Then it heads north and hits Thailand,
and then, Sri Lanka.
Now, the ripples of the tsunami are spreading out at this point,
and, although they've lost some of their power,
they're still capable of inflicting serious damage
when they reach as far as the east coast of Africa, 4,000 miles away.
The original earthquake which caused the tsunami
measured 9.1 magnitude.
So enormous, that it set 30 trillion litres of water in motion.
Even this long after the earthquake,
the wave was still travelling at high speed.
But every mile it covered decreased its power.
Now, as it approached the coast of Africa,
it hit undersea rocks and coral reefs,
which slowed it down even more.
That meant the waves were far smaller than those that had
hit Thailand six-and-a-half hours earlier.
By the time they reached the coast of Somalia,
the waves had shrunk in size from 50 feet to 16 feet.
But they were still powerful enough to make 50,000 people homeless
and kill nearly 300.
By now, in Britain and around the world,
the tsunami was leading the news bulletins.
NEWSREADER: Paradise lost,
the tropical coastline smashed by nature's awesome power.
But details were still sketchy.
What all the news organisations desperately needed was to
get journalists on the ground.
They began scrambling reporters onto planes to get them out
to Southeast Asia.
But in Sri Lanka, in the resort of Thangool,
one journalist was already there, caught up in the event herself.
Katie Razzall was on her honeymoon with her husband, Oz,
when the tsunami struck.
What happens on Boxing Day morning?
I went out, and the sea had come up and was, sort of, lapping.
It just was like a mini flood.
And then, I got knocked over by water and people shouting,
"Get out, get out, you've got to get out!"
And we jumped out the back, and we, sort of, ran up there.
But there wasn't a wave following me.
Katie and Oz were lucky.
Their hotel was protected from the direct impact of the tsunami
by a jutting headland.
So, the waves they experienced were much less powerful.
Once Katie and Oz knew they were safe,
Katie's reporter instincts took over, and she went to
investigate what was going on.
So I kicked into thinking, "l've got to find out what's happening."
We went into the town, and that was, you know,
really horrific, really sobering.
There was so much destruction.
As signs that everything had been lifted up,
a lot of it left where it was, and then, destroyed homes.
Photographs everywhere, and just people's lives destroyed.
And then, she noticed something else.
When we got to the fishing port,
there were destroyed boats there...
But when she glanced up to see,
the fishing boats out there seemed to be OK.
Looking out to sea and seeing a perfectly fine fishing boat
arriving, coming back into port with fishermen standing on it,
that, you know, looking horrified, almost gesticulating to Heaven.
You know, "What has happened here?" Looking at their town and just
seeing this sea of devastation that they clearly had had no idea
that this was happening.
The fishermen had gone out on their daily trips earlier that morning,
but they were returning to shocking scenes.
Remarkably, by being out at sea, they had somehow survived
the tsunami without even being aware it had happened.
But how is that possible?
What Katie witnessed happened across the Indian Ocean.
Some fishermen who were at sea when the tsunami struck
barely noticed the tsunami wave.
But when they returned to shore hours later, they found their ports,
their villages destroyed.
That's because out at sea, the Boxing Day tsunami wave measured
less than three feet in height.
So, the fishing boat Katie saw was able to ride the top of the wave
without really noticing it.
But, as the wave got close to shore,
the friction of the seabed slowed it down,
allowing the water behind it to catch up and building it into
a tower of water more than 30 feet in height.
This phenomenon is why it's called the tsunami.
In Japanese, the word translates as "harbour wave".
In Thailand, which was closer to the epicentre of the quake,
the waves were even bigger, up to 50 feet in height.
Two of them had hit just five minutes apart,
and then, over the next 12 hours,
there were a series of smaller waves.
Even this long after the initial tsunami,
survivors still feared there might be more on the way.
I've been following the story of Luke and his brother, Piers,
who were in a cafe on Koh Phi Phi when the tsunami struck,
and they were separated by the wave.
Luke had managed to scramble to safety on a hill,
but his brother, Piers, was still missing.
So that night, you slept on top of a hill?
We slept on a hill, yeah. Just in the bush? Yeah, yeah.
So, we drifted in and out of consciousness
throughout the night...
...until someone would scream a couple of hundred metres up
on the spine of the hill.
Even though at that point,
I'd worked out how high we were above the sea,
when people wake up screaming,
your instinct is to get off the ground.
So, that was what would happen - you'd wake out this consciousness,
and immediately, you'd find yourself shooting up a palm tree.
Really? Yeah, because the surface of the earth that you had been on,
you know, 12 hours earlier,
had suddenly turned into a very different place
with water and debris.
That experience was actually worse than the real tsunami,
cos when the real tsunami struck, we didn't know what was going on.
But up in that hill, we felt like it was almost a bit of a waiting game,
and you had the knowledge of, you know, what might be coming.
And so, that's what made it scary.
Back home in the UK, more details about the disaster
were beginning to come through.
Good afternoon. Thousands are dead.
Millions more have lost everything in a massive earthquake
in Southeast Asia.
At their home in Somerset,
Luke's parents had no idea what had happened to their sons.
But they were about to get a call from the other side of the world.
It was now 13 hours since the tsunami began,
and it was still speeding around the world.
The energy released by the undersea earthquake,
equivalent to 23,000 atomic bombs,
was raising sea levels as far afield as South Africa,
5,000 miles away.
Waves struck Cape Town and towns and villages along the coast.
Although they weren't big enough to cause much damage,
the sea level rose by two feet,
and eight swimmers were killed in the turbulent waters.
At home in Somerset, Celia and Henry Simon had no idea
what had happened to their sons, Luke and Piers,
who were in Thailand.
Luke, captured here in news footage from the time, had not been able
to get through to his parents.
At this stage, most people in the UK didn't have any idea of
the whereabouts of their loved ones.
I can only imagine the stress and anxiety, and helplessness
that Luke's parents were feeling.
I mean, at least Luke knew that he was alive,
and that his brother was missing -
but his parents didn't know what was going on at all.
Hello, Xand, nice to see you. Come on in. Thank you, Celia.
I had the radio on in the bedroom, and they just said about
this tsunami, which was going across Asia, and I thought,
"Oh, my goodness."
And then, they happened to say that it had devastated Phi Phi,
and of course, I was like this, "Oh, my gosh!"
And I screamed to Henry, and I said, you know, "Come in, quick."
And that was it, really, wasn't it?
We put on the television and just waited, and waited and waited.
And did you know what a tsunami was at that point? No, no.
And you were trying to get hold of Piers, trying to get hold of Luke,
weren't you? And we couldn't get though.
And we tried to register with the official missing persons line,
and didn't get through.
Having better luck getting news home was Shenth Ravindra.
When the tsunami derailed the train he was travelling on in Sri Lanka,
he was one of only a handful of survivors
from the 1,700 people on board.
In the hours since the disaster,
he had managed to walk inland away from the water,
and by mid-afternoon,
he'd reached the safety of a farm five miles away.
What happened when you arrived at the farm? Did you feel relieved?
Did you feel safe? Yeah.
So, the farm was dry.
The water hadn't reached it, which told me
that if this happened again, we were probably in a safe place.
The water travelled two-and-a-half miles inland,
taking down phone lines and all forms of communication
from the disaster zone.
But here at the farm, beyond the waterline,
the phone and the TV were still working.
They had CNN on the TV, and there was reports of a tsunami
in Banda Aceh, in Indonesia.
And I remember looking at that, thinking,
"Could that be what I just experienced?"
And then, I think it was later that day I actually saw
the train on the news.
And I thought to myself, "Hang on a minute, I was on that train."
Terrified that his family would see the news and worry about him,
Shenth was desperate to get a message back home to the UK.
He used the phone at the farm to call the British Embassy in Colombo.
Got through to somebody there, and said that I was on this train.
"Can you get a message to my mum who's in London?"
She didn't know about the tsunami,
and she had a message waiting for her saying that "your son's fine",
so there was no worry factor from her perspective. Wow.
By now, the power of the tsunami was fading.
It had made it all the way to Australia,
where boats were pulled from their moorings.
But it was no longer the terrifying force it had once been.
This was now one of the most devastating tsunamis ever.
But parts of Southeast Asia have a long history of tsunamis,
and Raksha has gone to find out about one of the most famous.
I'm meeting volcanologist Amber Madden-Nadeau to find out
about the last big tsunami that hit this area of Southeast Asia.
It happened nearly 150 years ago
along the same geological fault line.
The Boxing Day Tsunami isn't the first time there's been
a tsunami in this region, is there?
No, one of the most famous instances of a tsunami was generated by
the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.
The main phase of this eruption occurred on 26 and 27 August, 1883.
Unlike the 2004 tsunami, which was triggered
by an undersea earthquake,
the wave in 1883 was caused by something very different...
...a volcanic eruption.
When the volcano erupted, it threw millions of tonnes of debris, ash,
rock and lava into the ocean,
displacing the sea water,
causing a tsunami.
About 1,000 of the death toll was generated by the eruption itself,
but the majority of deaths - $035,000 -
was from the subsequent tsunamis.
And it wasn't just one big tsunami.
There were around 18 waves in total.
This death toll was only a fraction of the quarter of a million people
killed by the Boxing Day Tsunami.
But just like the 2004 disaster,
this one also hit the international headlines.
Krakatoa was one of the first international news stories -
thanks to recently-laid undersea telegraph cables
connecting Southeast Asia to Europe,
bulletins now took hours, rather than weeks,
to travel across the world.
You could read about this eruption in London the next day.
So, see, an example of one of the first global news events.
And it's actually why we call it "Krakatoa", as well.
The name of the volcano is actually "Krakatau".
Oh, hang on!
I've been saying it wrong for all this time?! Yes.
One of the first Telegraph reports had a typo in it.
And that's why it's persisted, in the West, that the volcano
is called "Krakatoa",
but it's actually "Krakatau".
Almost a day after the earthquake caused the tsunami,
the energy in the wave was much reduced -
but it was still capable of raising tides and causing freak
waves as far afield as Brazil, 9,000 miles away.
As dawn broke across the ocean on the morning of 27 December,
the tsunami itself was over - but the disaster wasn't.
This was just the beginning of a hugely traumatic process,
the recovery operation, the search for survivors
and the identification of bodies.
On Koh Phi Phi in Thailand, Luke Simon and other survivors
had spent the night on a hilltop
away from the worst of the devastation.
We stayed there until first light,
and then, I wanted to get down
because I wanted to carry on looking for Piers.
And so, I said to the others, "Come on, I want to get down."
We went back to the cafe we were in because I had this daft idea that
our bags might still be in the corner.
What was absolutely staggering in that cafe is that there was
no paint on the walls.
I mean, the water had just stripped everything.
It was just a shell.
I didn't really want to look to see if Piers might be in there,
but I thought, you know, he could be in all of that.
And at that point, I still had my mobile phone in my pocket,
and very little coverage.
Of course, all of the networks were down.
I tried to get hold of Mum and Dad. I couldn't get through.
I sent them a text, and it wasn't terribly clear.
I think it just said, "Five of us OK, we've lost P."
And that's all I could get through,
so that would have been an awful text to receive.
In the UK, Celia and Henry received the garbled message from Luke,
but they still didn't have a clear idea if the boys were OK.
We were on tenterhooks the whole time.
I remember doing Boxing Day lunch for my mum and my sister,
and her partner, and my mum looked really worried.
And, when we sat down to lunch, I said, "Let's just all pray,
"hold hands and pray, and pray that they're going to be all right."
When you went to bed on Boxing Day, you didn't actually go to bed.
We didn't go to bed.
We just sat up all night watching the television.
Unable to get another message through to his parents,
Luke tried a different tack.
I was able to get a phone call through to my work colleague
who had gone home to Australia, and I explained the situation.
I said, "l can't get through to Mum and Dad,
"please can you ring them up - this is their phone number -
"and relay this information back to them."
And how were you feeling at that point?
Like anybody, I suppose.
Absolutely frantic, because we just wanted to know, you know,
what was happening out there. You felt helpless.
We felt helpless here, absolutely,
because we just couldn't seem to get any answers.
In Thailand, Luke was now one of thousands hunting for
friends and relatives,
but even the survivors weren't out of danger.
They urgently needed food, clean drinking water, and medicines.
It was now a race against time to get supplies into
the devastated areas,
and to find out where help was most needed,
rescuers turned to something unexpected.
24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami, the sea had calmed,
but the devastation it had left behind was horrifying.
Now, I've worked in major disasters, and, of course, injured people
immediately need first aid - but as well as that,
if your village or town has been completely destroyed,
just about everything needs replacing immediately.
But one of the biggest problems early on, was for rescue parties
to try and figure out how to get aid in to the worst-affected areas.
In 2004, the problem was finding out where the help was most needed.
And to do this, the rescuers turned to an unexpected place for help -
the worldwide space agencies.
It's not just on this coastline here, because it impacts on
the smaller islands, as well.
I'm meeting Emily Gravestock from the UK Space Agency to find out how
satellite technology helped emergency services on the ground.
We relied on very high-resolution imagery to people on the ground,
to those rescuers, to allow them to identify which roads were blocked,
which bridges had been washed away,
to allow the local authorities to have the information.
If you can get to this hospital from this point,
you can't get to others.
Because one of the great things we can provide is that comparison.
What was it like yesterday, and what's it like today?
In 2004, using satellite technology to help in disaster zones
was relatively new - and the Boxing Day tsunami
was the biggest test yet of its capabilities.
Space organisations from around the world responded by providing
their satellites to capture images of affected areas.
What we do when we get those calls is we look at what imagery
is already available,
and we look at what satellites can be twisted slightly to provide
different images that will be helpful in this recovery.
This image is of Banda Aceh, in Indonesia -
the first place the tsunami had hit.
Here's one of the images that was pulled up that was actually taken
in June, before the disaster struck.
And you can see the individual properties, the trees, the roads.
You can see the different aspects of that individual town.
It just looks like a normal city town, doesn't it,
from an aerial? Absolutely.
And then, you come to this one, which was taken on 28 December,
and some of the things that you can identify, that's really helpful
for rescuers, there's a large building there.
If you flick back to the original, that's still standing.
But the road network that's around it has all been knocked out.
You can see different flooded areas.
You can see that there are piles of debris.
As somebody who's on the ground looking to do recovery,
to help people, understanding what the situation was and what it is now
and where you might find people and things -
things like that are absolutely vital.
That is quite incredible, isn't it, when you look at the after image?
Another image of Banda Aceh shows how the extent of the flooding
had wiped out entire areas of the city.
So this is the 2003 image,
and you can see the bridge is completely intact.
And then, 29 December, 2004, the bridge is no longer intact.
The contrast is so stark on that image,
it's absolutely terrifying to look at.
You can also see some of the water courses that existed in the original
image have suddenly enlarged because they flooded,
and the flooding's not gone away.
While rescuers were using the satellite images to work out
how to get help in,
news organisations were also struggling to get reporters
to the devastated areas.
Journalist Katie Razzall had been on her honeymoon
in Sri Lanka when the tsunami hit.
Now, three clays on, her holiday turned into a news assignment.
I got a call from the foreign editor at Channel 4 News.
She said, "We're going to be reporting from Sri Lanka.
"And if you want to do it, that's your choice."
And I said, "Yes, I would like to."
And they flew a cameraman out.
Katie needed transport to cover the story, so she called a driver
she'd hired a few clays earlier.
We later found out that the driver...
...his grandmother had died in the tsunami.
His house had been destroyed in the tsunami, and he had still
turned up to pick us up.
Katie and the crew managed to get to a town on the coast
to film a report.
What's left of beachfront Hambantota,
1,000 bodies recovered so far.
I think it was just being a journalist, I thought,
"l need to find out what's happening."
This is how I understand the world, is through reporting it, usually,
and I think I just went into that default mode.
You can see how high the ocean rose up, sweeping tiles off that house,
throwing this boat up onto the roof of this house.
There was a Sunday market going on just over there.
Thousands of people in this area, the sea coming in,
destroying everything as far as the eye can see.
Within minutes, lives and businesses washed away.
There's just lots of things that I hope I'll never see again.
Reports by Katie and other news teams brought the horror of the
tsunami into homes across the world.
And soon, questions were being asked about how tsunami-prone areas
could be made safer.
Raksha has gone to find out.
I've come to Europe's largest tsunami simulator in Wallingford,
Oxfordshire, to meet Professor Tiziana Rossetto,
an expert on coastal defences.
Why can't we just build defences or sea walls to stop these huge
tsunamis from hitting into these coastal areas?
So, we can, but they have to be massive.
A normal sea wall is designed for storm waves, and they happen much
more frequently than a tsunami,
which might happen every 200 years or so.
This 150-foot long tank is used by scientists to test out different
ways of protecting coastal towns from the sea.
It can create all types of waves in miniature.
Tiziana has set up an experiment to show me how sea walls cope
against tsunami waves.
This miniature version would be almost ten feet high in real life.
It would be very visible if you went to the seaside and saw it,
even though it doesn't look very impressive in the scale model.
What we're going to see is a tsunami with a wave height
of around five metres coming in,
so let's see how it fares.
And bear in mind, our tsunami was over 30 feet high.
So that's the sea wall, and as you can see,
the water's starting to overtop it.
It's not stopping the water anymore.
And the tsunami wave keeps coming and coming, and coming.
It's like a very, very long flow.
It's like as though it's not even there. Exactly.
The wave doesn't see it.
And now, it's completely engulfed all of those houses, hasn't it?
Absolutely.
Even high sea walls can't protect against tsunamis.
And sometimes, they can add to the problem.
If anything, sometimes when a sea wall breaks, it can be worse
because the water will have accumulated at the front,
and then, is released as a big bore onto the houses behind.
And this is actually worse.
It's a stronger force and can be more devastating.
Even if sea walls had been in place in 2004,
they wouldn't have protected people from the force of the tsunami.
The only effective escape route is to head to higher ground.
But to give people time to do this,
early warning systems are needed.
In 2004, before widespread mobile communications,
those systems just weren't in place,
which allowed the tsunami to claim hundreds of thousands of lives.
In the UK, reports about the tsunami
were watched by millions who were glued to the 24-hour rolling news.
Celia and Henry had now been waiting for news of their missing son,
Piers, for four days.
His brother, Luke, was still searching for him.
You've got lots of people coming around, Piers' friends, as well.
What happens from there?
Yes.
Who do you mean? The media.
Once the news broke out that he was missing,
it was just constant, wasn't it?
Trying to keep on top of all the information that they needed,
Henry started writing everything down in notebooks.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's out there.
And during this time, Luke got in touch with us and said,
"Oh, they'd been to the hospital in the morgue,
"and they wanted dental records."
This is getting close to any parent's nightmare -
going to your dentist to get dental records
to start identifying bodies. Yeah.
As his parents hunted for Piers' dental records, in Thailand,
Luke was still desperately hoping he'd find his brother.
By New Year's Eve, five clays had passed since the tsunami,
and the world's biggest-ever rescue operation was under way
across Southeast Asia.
In Koh Phi Phi and other affected areas,
emergency relief efforts were largely successful,
unlike previous disasters of this magnitude.
Almost nobody died of outbreaks of disease,
lack of clean water, or starvation.
And that was true even on remote islands off India and Indonesia,
thanks in part to satellite technology.
But as the clean-up continued,
the death toll rose as bodies were being recovered,
and the grisly process of identification began.
Luke Simon had now spent five desperate clays hunting for
his brother, Piers.
NEWSREADER: Maybe, just maybe, someone will recognise Piers' face.
On New Year's Eve, his search led him to a temple that had been turned
into a makeshift morgue.
The bodies were laid out on a marble floor in 35-degree heat
with plastic sheeting over them.
So, the smell...was just horrendous.
And then, we sat down to watch a slide show of dead bodies.
But you didn't have to look at everybody.
If a body had a green T-shirt on, I didn't look at it,
cos Piers had a red T-shirt on.
And so I'd glance, "no, not that one," you'd wait,
4-5 images, you'd look at the next one. "No, that's not..."
And we got to body 348, and it was a red Oakley T-shirt
that Piers had had on, and I said, "That's Piers."
And then, there were 4-5 photographs.
There was one of his watch, one of his phone, one of his passport.
So, I said, "l want to go and see Piers,"
and this forensic lady, she said, "l won't let you.
"This doesn't need to be the last memory you have of your brother."
How did you feel in that moment?
I think I...
My approach to all of it was that it was a job.
It was a task that I had to do.
And the task wasn't over when we found Piers.
The task, to some extent, was only just beginning.
Luke then had to break the news to his parents.
I answered the phone, and he said, "Mum," he said, "We found him."
And I said, "Right, OK..."
And we looked at one another and we said, "He searched for his brother.
"It's up to him what happens."
But deep down, I really wanted him to come home.
And...so he said, "l want to bring him home."
And we said, "That's fantastic."
"That's really lovely."
I mean, that's a very difficult phone call for him and for you.
I think, in a way, that was a relief that we'd actually found him,
because going forward, we had gone out to Thailand 2-3 times,
and we still met people still looking, after about ten months,
still looking for their relatives.
Journalist Katie Razzall had been reporting on the tsunami
in Sri Lanka - but as her assignment came to an end,
she faced a dilemma.
She and husband, Oz, had originally come to Sri Lanka on honeymoon,
but now they were contemplating whether they should leave.
Once we'd done this report, we both picked up from the
Sri Lankans we met that they didn't want us to leave,
they needed tourist money more than anything,
and all the tourists were leaving,
and were probably going to leave for a long time.
And everywhere we went, we'd met people who'd experienced something,
obviously, of the tsunami, and that was really helpful.
By the time you'd left, all the information about the tsunami,
the immediate consequence of the event,
you'd sort of processed in-country.
You'd been there with people who'd been in some way affected
or knew people who were. Yeah.
It felt like it was the right thing to do at the time.
And for us, not only did we feel like we'd in some way helped
by doing a report, but then, also had time afterwards to speak
to people, learn their stories, tell them our stories,
share the feeling of what it had been like.
It just meant that by the time we got back...
...we weren't as traumatised as we might've been if we'd just
flown out straight away.
Unlike Katie, who stayed in Sri Lanka to process the experience,
Shenth decided to head straight home to London.
I'm not the best of flyers at the best of times.
So...it was a bit of a tense flight because every bit of turbulence,
I kind ofjust panicked a little bit,
just wanted to get home in one piece.
He was one of only a handful of survivors from the 1,700 passengers
on the train in Sri Lanka.
This wasn't my first brush with death, as such.
I had a car accident when I was 18.
I'm very lucky.
Dodged the bullet twice.
I do think, being one of the small amount of people that survived
the tsunami due to, you know, good decision-making on my part,
but also some fortunate, individual, episodic events
makes me think that I'm very lucky to be on the planet, and blessed.
After the death of Piers,
Luke, Celia, and Henry knew their lives would never be the same again.
They were determined to do something in his memory.
In the memorial speech that Luke did, he just said,
"We'd love to help the people of Phi Phi, what, you know,
they're going through," and we had ten...?
£10,000 that day. Really?
And then, we started getting cheques coming in, and people then started
to know that we were going to help the people of Phi Phi.
The money raised by Luke, Celia, and Henry in Piers' memory helped
fund the clean-up of Koh Phi Phi
and support countries affected by disasters.
Then, they set up a charity, School In A Bag,
to provide school bags with educational resources, hygiene items
and eating utensils to disadvantaged children around the world.
It's amazing talking to Luke and Henry, and Celia.
I think, to be honest, I was expecting it to be
quite a gloomy conversation.
I mean, we're talking about
the death of a very-loved son and brother.
And in fact, it was a happy conversation.
And I think they have recovered from this personal disaster for them
in the way that I think communities recover from big disasters
for a whole area - that they have taken this event
and turned it into something positive and joyful, and meaningful,
and incredibly valuable.
16 years on, many survivors have rebuilt their lives,
but the loss of life devastated communities.
The Indian Ocean earthquake and the tsunami that it caused
killed almost a quarter of a million people across 14 countries.
That makes it the deadliest natural disaster on record.
It flattened thousands of miles of coastal towns and villages,
causing £6.4 billion worth of physical damage.
Worst affected was the one it hit first on that Boxing Day morning -
the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, where 167,000 people died.
Banda Aceh received some of the £5 billion donated
by countries across the world, and has been largely rebuilt.
Dendy Montgomery witnessed both the destruction
and the reconstruction.
Do you feel like this many years on,
you have recovered, and the people around you
have recovered in some ways?
Banda Aceh is getting normal now.
The economy is back.
The coffee shop activity,
that's the main thing what happened in Banda Aceh.
Because despite the thousands of mosque,
it's the thousands of coffee shop from the past and now.
So, when we can see the mosque is again chanting Arabic
and the coffee shop is open,
that's life in Banda Aceh.
And beach!
Today, the places hit by the tsunami have recovered.
The homes, hotels, and schools have been rebuilt,
and the tourists have returned.
But some things have changed.
The Boxing Day tsunami was a wake-up call.
And in 2006, a warning system was set up to look for earthquakes and
sea level rises in the Indian Ocean.
If a threat is detected, then alerts are sent via text message,
via radio news flashes and television alerts...
RADIO ALERT
...even broadcasts from mosque loudspeakers.
And those give people in immediate danger a bit of time to
get to higher ground before a tsunami strikes.
It means, in theory, at least, that if this were to happen again,
there wouldn't be such a devastating loss of life.
Although today there's very little evidence of the horrifying
physical destruction these places suffered in 2004,
the psychological scars remain.
But, in speaking to survivors, what's really struck me
is their astonishing resilience,
their ability to cope with loss,
and their capacity to process and describe
the shocking things they witnessed.
But more than anything, what I feel like I've seen is
people's determination to look forwards with positivity and
optimism, and rebuild their lives.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media