20 years of Boxing Day tsunami: Are we ready to prevent a repeat?

It was the tale of Hamaguchi in school textbooks that introduced many Indian kids to the word “tsunami”. It was terrible, but something distant that happened in another part of the world, we thought, until Boxing Day 2004 changed everything. Suddenly, tsunami was very real; it had hit our home.

Yes, it’s been 20 years since one of the deadliest earthquakes hit Indonesia, and the resultant tsunamis left more than 226,000 people dead across 14 countries, including India, and displaced 1.6 million.

The quake itself was massive, notching up 9.1 on the Richter scale. And then came the gigantic waves — some 160 feet tall — ripping through the Indian Ocean at up to 800 km per hour, more than twice the speed of a bullet train, giving those on the shores no chance to escape, or even know what had hit them.

Such was the severity of the quake that massive waves struck even the African coast, over 3,000 km from the epicentre. Towering waves roared into coastal areas of Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and nine other countries around the Indian Ocean basin, flattening and submerging entire villages and leaving behind unprecedented death and destruction.

As the 2004 tsunami completes 20 years on Thursday (December 26), here’s a recap of what happened on that fateful day and an estimate of what would happen if a natural disaster of a similar scale were to strike today.

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The science behind 2004 nightmare

Indonesia, located on the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity, is not new to temblors. But the 2004 quake was massive even for its standards.

As the theory of plate tectonics suggests, earthquakes happen when tectonic plates collide or slide over or under each other. On Boxing Day 2004, the Indian Ocean floor split at least 1,200 km between the India plate and the Burma microplate, marking the longest fault line rupture ever recorded from an earthquake.

The epicentre was located 240 km from the Sumatra coast, some 30 km deep, according to the US Geological Survey. The energy that released was equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

Level of destruction

According to EM-DAT, a recognised global disaster database, 226,408 people died because of the 2004 tsunami. In northern Sumatra alone, more than 120,000 people were killed, while the toll for entire Indonesia was 165,708.

More than 35,000 people died in Sri Lanka, 16,389 in India, and 8,345 in Thailand, according to EM-DAT. Some 300 people were killed in Somalia, 100 in the Maldives, and dozens in Malaysia and Myanmar.

More than 1.5 million people were displaced as hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed. In the western Indonesian province of Aceh alone, more than 100,000 houses were rebuilt, says the Indonesian government.

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Wake-up call

The tsunami came as a huge wake-up call, not only for the affected countries but also for the entire world, revealing major gaps in early warning systems, preparedness, and response mechanisms worldwide.

At that time, both early warning technologies and disaster management systems existed in many of the impacted countries but the link between the two was weak. Often, early warning information would merely be faxed to disaster management organizations as internet access was not widely available.

The Indian Ocean region in general had no warning system in place. Experts have often said that the lack of a properly coordinated warning system had worsened the 2004 disaster’s impact. In Thailand, for instance, thousands of vacationers did not receive any warning and failed to recognize one classic sign of a tsunami — the ocean receding drastically from the beach.

How have we progressed in 20 years?

Only one year after the tsunami, in 2005, 168 countries ratified the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) and agreed to reduce disaster risks globally and build greater resilience together.

India, the US, Japan, Australia, Germany, and organizations such as the UNESCO and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) joined hands to establish the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System.

As part of the system that became officially operational in 2006, buoys were installed across the Indian Ocean to monitor tsunamis, and a network of seismic stations and sea-level monitoring stations were also set up.

Furthermore, the Global Tsunami Warning System, spanning the Pacific, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Caribbean, and North-East Atlantic regions, has 1,400 stations that send notices to coastal communities within minutes of detecting any major sea-level disturbance, reducing response times and saving lives worldwide.

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Is India tsunami-ready?

The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) acts as a key agency in the country in implementing an ocean-observing system and has made significant advancements in tsunami warning and mitigation.

Srinivasa Kumar Tummala, director of INCOIS, told news agency ANI that there are four regional systems of tsunami warning worldwide. “All these systems work in tandem, and can provide warnings to vulnerable populations in different countries globally. The Indian Ocean tsunami warning system has three tsunami service providers...There are lots of sensors from which data is being shared in real time and then they can detect tsunamis,” he explained.

INCOIS Group Director Pattabhi Rama Rao told ANI that INCOIS has established a network of 36 real-time tide-gauge stations along India’s coast to monitor sea levels and detect potential tsunamis triggered by earthquakes in the Indian Ocean.

Senior scientist at INCOIS, Balakrishnan Nair, said India’s tsunami early warning system has been successfully predicting tsunamis in the Indian Ocean for two decades. Additionally, 26 tsunami-ready villages have been established in India, primarily in Odisha, with more in development.

Can a 2004 Boxing Day-like devastation be totally prevented?

Unfortunately, ocean scientists warn that the impact of a catastrophic tsunami can never be completely prevented. Besides, multi-hazard early warning systems are still out of reach for the majority of the world’s population, according to UNESCO.

A study by the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has revealed that only 38 per cent of countries have comprehensive multi-hazard monitoring, observation, and forecasting systems. Developing nations face major challenges with the costs of supporting these systems besides integrating them into comprehensive disaster management plans.

In 2015, UNESCO created its Tsunami Ready Recognition Programme to recognize communities that meet a standard level of tsunami preparedness based on 12 indicators. Now, communities in more than 30 countries are tsunami-ready.

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According to Bernardo Aliaga, Head of Tsunami Resilience at UNESCO, “We now know within minutes if a tsunami is imminent, and communities have the tools to act. This progress has been lifesaving.”

In 2022, a new international initiative known as Early Warning for All was also spearheaded by the UN WMO to help build international support to fill the remaining gaps and ensure everyone in the world is protected by early warnings by 2027.