3 years after the Indian Ocean Earthquake of December 2004
“The sea is a different colour today – a Tsunami might come”, the old woman said, her eyes tinged with sadness as she sold bottled water from a counter in a long row of dilapidated shacks.
The scars of the 2004 Asian Tsunami can be seen everywhere. Besides the fear that remains in peoples faces, a nearby tree lay un-rooted whilst trucks trundle uncertainly across a rickety wooden bridge. The legs of the original concrete bridge, destroyed by 100 ft waves, stick out of the water like broken teeth.
Your local travel agent might have you believe that it’s all over, that the resorts have been rebuilt and it’s business as usual on Thailand’s Andaman coast. But cycle a few hundred meters outside of the resorts where Westerners enjoy cool Singha beers and the warm hospitality of the Thai people, and it’s a very different story.
Many people have struggled to rebuild homes (unrecognisable as such by Western standards), and are having a hard time time living from the remaining natural resources which were devastated following an undersea earthquake so large that our Earth wobbled on its Axis and our days are now 2.7 microseconds shorter.
The human toll from the Tsunami came to 229,866 people lost, including 186,983 dead and 42,883 missing. Survivors continue to mourn their losses, left with farm fields still contaminated by salt water, limited infrastructure for the treatment of sewage and provision of fresh water and the collapse of local fishing industries.
The healthy return of tourism to the region is certainly helping to inject funds into local economies, and a sense of normality is slowly returning, but the memory of 26th December 2004 continues to traumatise many survivors struggling to scrape a living from a coastline still bearing many scars of the most deadly natural disaster in living memory.
The Andaman Coast of Thailand and its people have fully recovered from the tsunami. It’s wrong to suggest that it’s so. It’s certainly true that some people are still mentally scarred, as you’d expect, but by any practical measure, normal live returned some time back. Indeed, there are very few vestigal signs of the tsunami, beyond rebuilt bridges. Trees are upturned in large storms every monsoon season. To create the impression that the tsunami atmosphere still lingers three years on is plain wrong. Now, if you are concerned about lingering tsunami damage, I suggest you write about Indonesia, or Sri Lanka, or India, where the recovery continues.
Certainly further North you are right (you live in Phuket, right). But the Southern coast, I would argue, is not there yet – at least from what I have seen and the people I have spoken to.
Although since I understand that you live in Thailand then you perhaps have a better feeling for it. Thanks for your input.
Mark, really pleased to see someone writing about the tsunami, for many reasons. Not least, I was studying with a Sri Lankan girl in 2004, and was so impressed that she upped and left the UK immediately to go home and help with the clear up.
There is an important message missing from your article, that is relevant to developed and developing worlds: our desire to be close to the beach puts us at great danger. One of the reasons the death toll was so high is because people did not want to leave their business behind: tourism creates a situation where local people become dependent on the wealth of foreign visitors, as a result they ignore instincts learnt over generations.
In the US, hurricanes are causing so much more (financial) damage in the last 20 years because increasing wealth has led to people building fancy houses and tourist developments on the coast.
Whilst in Sri Lanka in 2007 I had the opportunity to talk to a number of people about the tsunami. One wonderful story was of the girl of 6 that saved about 50 people by raising the alarm that the animals were all moving uphill, ‘so shouldn’t we be?’. One very sad story was that a lot of people saw the sea receding, and followed it out to investigate, with inevitable terrible consequences when the sea came back.
Thanks for highlighting that message Matt. You are right, and this is all part of the tradgedy.