World
Indian Ocean tsunami two decades ago left 230,000 dead and a lasting legacy
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Two decades ago, as thousands of vacationers scattered across the sunlit shores of Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka on Christmas getaways, a mighty force rattled the depths of the ocean floor just before 8 a.m.
The magnitude-9.1 earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004, 150 miles off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, packed the energy of 23,000 atomic bombs, according to National Geographic. The resulting tsunami unleashed waves more than 100 feet high and as fast as an airliner.
Within hours, the tsunami had claimed nearly 230,000 human lives and displaced millions of people in 12 countries.
Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history.
The Boxing Day quake was one of the largest ever recorded.
“This earthquake didn’t just break all the records, it also broke some of the rules,” said Kerry Sieh, a geology professor at the California Institute of Technology, in a university release summarizing the findings of Sieh and others about the event. Their conclusions, suggesting that scientists needed to rethink previous notions about where massive quakes were likely to happen, were published in a 2006 Nature magazine article.
Indonesia suffered the worst of the devastation, with more than 170,000 people killed. In Thailand, beach resort tourists comprised about half of the nation’s death toll of 5,000, while in Sri Lanka, nearly 2,000 were killed when the surge swept a passenger train off its rails.
Throughout the region, fishing villages were turned to soggy rubble, boats tossed across tattered landscapes. The tsunami affected coastlines from Somalia to Sri Lanka, leaving thousands of survivors homeless and community bulletin boards plastered with photos of the missing.
The tragedy prompted the biggest global emergency response in history, according to humanitarian aid agency UNICEF. The international community pledged more than $14 billion in aid.
The disaster had profound sociological consequences, immediate and long-term. Forces mobilized in the aftermath of the tsunami to offer haven to orphaned children and protect them from human trafficking. UNICEF and other organizations worked to address the mental health of traumatized children and get them back into school and a sense of stability.
A five-year post-tsunami study led by University of North Carolina sociologist Elizabeth Frankenberg, then at Duke University, found that many orphaned teens were forced to mature quickly. Boys dropped out of school to take on jobs while girls were suddenly saddled with domestic responsibilities.
According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the event was a wakeup call, reshaping the global community’s collective approach to disaster preparedness and prompting major advances in tsunami early-warning systems throughout the world. Additionally, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps began to focus on making humanitarian assistance and disaster relief part of their core capabilities.
“The Indian Ocean tsunami 20 years ago has reshaped the way the humanitarian community addresses emergencies today, highlighting the importance of disaster preparedness,” a European Union paper issued last month said.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization, more commonly known as UNESCO, said it has invested in seabed mapping and other technologies as part of its commitment to advance tsunami science and readiness.
“The 20th anniversary of the 2004 tsunami is an opportunity to call on States to continue efforts in supporting and funding for tsunami preparedness and education,” the organization said.
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