December 26, 2004
The Indian Ocean tsunami
A wave across fourteen countries, on the morning after Christmas
The earthquake off Sumatra was the third largest ever recorded and lifted the sea floor by metres. There was no warning system in the Indian Ocean.
Aceh was hit in fifteen minutes and lost a hundred and seventy thousand. Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives and the coast of east Africa followed over the next seven hours.
About two hundred and twenty-eight thousand were killed. A third were children. Many thousands were foreign holidaymakers, which is why it was on every television in Europe for a fortnight and why so many countries grieved for a coast they had never seen.
On a beach in Phuket a ten-year-old English girl called Tilly Smith recognised the receding sea from a geography lesson she had had two weeks before, told her mother, and the beach was cleared. About a hundred people on it lived.