20 years since the worst natural disaster of the 21st century

The United Nations and activists continue to call, two decades later, for additional measures and more awareness among the population

This Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the largest natural disaster of the 21st century: the tsunami of December 26, 2004 in the Indian Ocean, a wave triggered by an underwater earthquake of magnitude 9.1 that left more than 220,000 dead in 14 countries around the world. –almost 170,000 fatalities in Indonesia alone–, material damage worth about 13,000 million euros and it became the catalyst for unthinkable political transformations in the affected regions.

The clearest example of the latter occurred in the epicenter of the catastrophe, the Indonesian province of Aceh, an impoverished region devastated by three decades of armed conflict between the guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). ) and the Indonesian Government that left more than 15,000 dead from 1976 until the arrival of the tsunami. A year later, motivated by terrible adversity, GAM and the Government reached a peace agreement in Helsinki (Finland).

The report published in 2006 by the Tsunami Assessment Coalition (TEC) – formed with the collaboration of 50 United Nations agencies, NGOs and the Red Cross – recounted the different impacts of the tragedy on each affected country. India had to rebuild a good part of its fishing sector, while in Thailand and the Maldives, tourism was the most affected area. The common denominator in almost all of them was the establishment of new early warning systems, although Indonesian activists have warned that these efforts, twenty years later, are still insufficient.

WAVES AT 800 KILOMETERS PER HOUR

“One of the most difficult statistics to accept is that the province of Aceh was hit by waves up to 50 meters high,” explained in a subsequent evaluation by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that “flooded the province from the coast to three kilometers inland”.

Waves that moved at 800 kilometers per hour reached Banda Aceh twenty minutes after the beginning of the earthquake, recorded at 07:58 on Thursday morning, local time. During the next hour and a half they reached Sri Lanka (35,300 dead) and Thailand (8,200 dead). The state of Tamil Nadu, in southern India, was hit two hours after the earthquake began, causing more than 16,200 deaths. The waves ended up reaching South Africa about seven hours later, 8,000 kilometers from the epicenter: two people died there.

In the most affected communities, recalls the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), a third of those who died were minors as a result of an earthquake that ruptured the longest fault ever recorded. covering an estimated distance of 1,500 kilometers, longer than the North American state of California.

ALERT TRANSFORMATION

“Before 2004 there was a belief that just by installing a system capable of detecting danger you would end the problem. After 2004 we realized that this was only the beginning,” explains the executive director of the Pacific Disaster Center ( PDC), Ray Shirkhodai, before recalling that the first tsunami warning reached the communities through a fax on a public holiday (December 26 is Boxing Day, which celebrates former colonies of the Empire British) “so maybe there were no people in the office when he arrived.”

“Remember that the tsunami occurred in 2004, so Internet access was not as widely available. And the dissemination of that information over the web, particularly for disaster management, was in question because of its speed and unreliability at that time,” he adds.

The situation has improved, in general terms. Thailand has installed two tsunami detection stations: one in 2006 about 965 kilometers from Phuket and another in 2017 about 340 kilometers from Phuket and within the exclusive economic zone. The Malaysian system has 83 sirens deployed throughout the country that are activated along with the SMS service and media alerts when a threat is identified.

The head of the PDC recognizes advances in threat warning and dissemination systems thanks to the development of telecommunications but warns that, more than two decades later, early warning systems for multiple risks are still out of reach of the majority of the population. world.

In fact, activists in Banda Aceh denounce that “the Indonesian government is not doing enough to educate the next generation,” according to Irma Lisa, a resident of a community that lost 90 percent of its residents in the tsunami.

“Some schools are located very close to the sea, but disaster preparedness is completely absent, not only in their curricula, but even in their extracurricular activities,” he tells BenarNews.

Ahmad Dadek, director of the Aceh Development Planning Agency, shares the same opinion. “Our disaster risk remains high, but our resilience index (post-catastrophe recovery capacity) remains quite low,” he warns the same medium.

The greatest danger, everyone agrees, is the inability of the authorities to raise awareness among the population that this catastrophe can happen again. “The most frightening aspect,” adds Thai senator Ratchaneekorn Thongthip, “is people’s lack of awareness and preparedness: even with warning buoys in place, it all depends on people understanding when to prepare when to prepare for possible warning signs”.

The fact is that the foundations for this exist: Banda Aceh’s economy has been growing steadily at 4% to 5% annually over the past five years. The province received almost 30,000 foreign visitors in 2023, compared to 2,632 the previous year amid travel restrictions due to Covid-19, in a new gesture of recovery in the face of adversities that have, at least, an equalizing nature.

“Before the tsunami,” survivor Munawir Saputra told the Straits Times, “the rich lived in a brick house and the poor lived in the wooden house: today we all live in one of the former.