22 December 2009
The Indian Ocean tsunami - on December 26, 2004 - was the deadliest on record and smashed into 13 Asian and African countries, leaving more than 220,000 people dead or missing and another 1.8 million displaced.
Colum Wilson managed the DFID response unit in London for the weeks immediately after the tsunami but then flew to Indonesia to join the aid effort on the ground in late February, 2005. He reflects on his experiences, and recalls the moments a few weeks later when an aftershock earthquake triggered fears of another tidal wave.
“I’ve still got the text message I received from the SMS alert system, saying there had been an earthquake off Indonesia measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale.
My first reaction was that the message must be wrong, but we later found out something massive had happened.
In those first few hours reliable information was hard to get.
I rang the FCO duty officer in Jakarta and asked them if they were aware of the quake. At first, they said, ‘don’t be silly, we’d know about something that big!’
A couple of hours later, the first reports said that a single building had collapsed after an earthquake in Aceh, killing four people.
The final death toll in Indonesia was more than 140,000.
Arriving in Banda Aceh in mid-February was a shocking sight
One half of the city seemed to be functioning relatively normally but the other half looked like another Hiroshima; it had just been annihilated.
In those few minutes after 8am, when the earthquake happened, anyone who had relatives, friends and loved ones on the other side of the city had lost them.
There was a collective sense of psychological trauma and people were still pulling out bodies. Outside town, a freshly dug field covered a mass grave had just been filled in with 80,000 bodies in it.
Later on, from a helicopter, I saw villages where aid had only just got through. Where there had been houses, there were just outlines on the ground – like footprints - with only the toilets left standing.
Often mosques had survived, and still stood white and gleaming among the rubble. Their pillars and arches had allowed the water to flow through them, and they had emerged unscathed. People found that comforting.
In mid-March, there was an aftershock measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale.
I was in bed when I felt the room move. Then the whole house was swaying and something fell off the roof.
Within five minutes the street outside was jam-packed with people running towards me. They had their possessions on their heads.
Nothing is more haunting than seeing the petrified look of people who have survived one tsunami and think a second is coming.
I called my wife who was having Sunday dinner and asked her not to be alarmed, but to search the internet for information about the epicentre of the quake. This might give a clue to how long we had if a new tsunami was coming.
Incredibly, I could see a car coming towards me, in the opposite direction to everyone else. It was my driver - who was probably scared witless - but had refused to flee and had chosen to pick me up.
That was one of the most amazing things about my time there.
Indonesia was only opened up to international help 10 days after the tsunami.
At that time it suddenly went from having about two humanitarian relief agencies to 380 groups on the ground.
Humanitarian work is basically common sense; providing food, water and shelter. The hard part is getting it done in an organised way, but we achieved a great deal in a short time.
Alongside the shelters and emergency education, there was the psycho-social support.
This was mass bereavement and suffering on such a huge scale. The breadth, depth and scale of the suffering were unfathomable.
We tried to get people to describe what had happened to help them mentally.
I hope no-one ever has to go through that again but I find speaking about it still helps me in some way.
The tsunami was a life-changing experience for me. Those memories are seared on my mind and will stay with me for a very long time.”