On December 26, 2004, an earthquake followed by a tsunami in the Indian Ocean caused more than 220,000 deaths in around fifteen countries.
Seconds before 7:59 a.m. local time, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra caused huge waves more than 30 meters high traveling at nearly 800 km/h . They swept across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other Indian Ocean countries. Africa was also affected, killing 300 people in Somalia, but also more than a hundred in the Maldives.
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.
20 years later, a look back at the impact of the deadliest tsunami in history.
Perhaps one of the most representative images of the human consequences of the tsunami of December 26, 2004. A woman clings to floating debris, before dying in Banda Aceh, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The cause of the natural disaster was an earthquake, caused by the rupture of the subduction zone between two tectonic plates. These are the Indian plate and the Andaman microplate, over a length of approximately 1,200 kilometers. Its epicenter was located 160 kilometers west of the island’s coast.
A street is littered with damaged vehicles and debris after the area was hit by a tidal wave on Patong Beach in Phuket, Thailand. The waves were more than 30 meters high, releasing energy equivalent to 23,000 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The father of a young tsunami victim cries with other family members as he holds his son’s body at the hospital in Galle, Sri Lanka, December 27, 2004. In total, the tsunami caused 226,408 deaths according to EM-DAT, a recognized global disaster database, including 35,000 people in Sri Lanka.
Relatives of victims killed by tsunami waves mourn at the site of a mass burial in Cuddalore, India, Monday, December 27, 2004.
A survivor searches through debris in the commercial area of Banda Aceh in northern Sumatra island, northwest Indonesia, December 31, 2004. It is the area most affected by the disaster, where more than 120,000 people were killed out of a total of 165,708 deaths in Indonesia. Since then, the city has been almost completely rebuilt, with more than 100,000 houses rebuilt in the province alone, according to the Indonesian government.
A boat passes a damaged hotel in Ton Sai Bay on Phi Phi island, Thailand, December 28, 2004. In the country, more than 5,000 people have died, half of whom were foreign tourists, and Another 3,000 were reported missing.
Karl Nilsson from Lulo, Sweden, poses with a sign stating that his parents and brothers are missing, December 28, 2004, in Phuket, Thailand. The young boys’ parents were swept out to sea two days before, when the tsunami hit their beach hotel just north of Phuket, Thailand.
People who lost family members to the deadly tsunami try to identify them from photos taken before their mass burial and later posted on billboards to help families identify their dead, in Vailankanni, near Nagapattinam , in India, Saturday January 8, 2005.
Tsunami victims at a relief camp reach for distributed rice packets in Nagappattinam in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Friday December 31, 2004.
An unidentified woman cries after tidal waves destroyed her house in the coastal areas of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Sunday December 26, 2004.
Rani Amma mourns her family who died in the tsunami at the place where her home once stood, in Nagappattinam, southern India, Wednesday January 12, 2005. Seven members of her family lost their lives: her four grandchildren- daughters, his son, his daughter and his son-in-law.
On the occasion of the commemoration of the 2004 tragedy, an Indian woman offers tributes in memory of the victims, at Marina Beach in Chennai, India, Thursday, December 26, 2024.
