December 26 marks the tenth anniversary of a deadly tsunami which swept across the Indian Ocean. Two southern Illinois residents say it's a day they'll never forget.
Rajvee Subramanian is a graduate student in SIU’s College of Mass Communication and Media Arts. But in 2004, he was working as a TV Journalist in India. On December 26th, 2004, Rajvee was working on a medical call-in and interview show, when the first calls started coming in. He says at first, he didn’t take the reports seriously:
"I thought it was a prank call, you know, how can the seawater come inside? So I figured, 'OK, we'll look into it.' Because we get a lot of calls like that."
More calls started coming in, and Rajvee took his place in the studio to begin an hours-long report on what was happening in and around his home. Reporters in the field told Rajvee about bodies floating in the water at the beach he visited several times a week – a shocking sight for so many people who had never dealt with – or in many cases even heard of – a tsunami.
What struck Rajvee and his colleagues initially was the sudden intensity of loss – lives wiped out in a matter of minutes.
"It all happened in a short period of time. You know, people who were near and dear to them, were just gone."
He says people’s lack of information about what was happening contributed to the high death tolls. Victims didn’t understand that when the water washed out dramatically, it was only building to come sweeping back in.
"They could see the land for extended lengths - like two or three kilometers. People are so startled, 'Hey, look we can walk into the beach for three kilometers.' Everybody just thought it was a great thing, and just ran into it. They didn't realize the beach was going inside to come back in a big way. And that's the reason so many people died."
SIU Journalism Prof Bill Recktenwald, a retired Chicago Tribune reporter, says he vividly remembers the sea rising, overtaking the patio where he’d been eating breakfast at a resort in Sri Lanka. The water reached 18 feet, and he was nearly swept away. But it was the people of the area he remembers most from those dramatic hours and days after the tsunami.
"I was very taken, first of all, by the kindness of the people of Sri Lanka. The people who lived there were very concerned about our health, and to see that we were safely transported to town."
He says trying to understand the breadth of loss is difficult – so many people killed so quickly – but he says remembering what happens will only help protect against loss of life in the future.
"The death toll is staggering. I mean, it's estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people lost their lives. Many villages and towns were just completely wiped out, so they don't know just how many people died. In Sri Lanka, 40,000 people died in just a matter of a few minutes, and Sri Lanka is a country of only 20 million people."
Seven thousand people died in Rajvee’s part of the country. He says the tsunami caught everyone – including the government – by surprise. But he says there was some good to come from it.
"This was really, really unexpected, and it came as sort of a wake-up call for the government agencies, and for civic agencies, to work together in times of disaster. There was no disaster preparedness in place in my part of the world."
When it comes to recovery, Rajvee says government leaders and first-responders learned a lot about what’s needed after a disaster. Food, water, clean conditions – he says money poured in, and many people profited from the loss.
In Sri Lanka, people have been moved, into more sturdy housing away from the danger areas. New schools have been built, and better infrastructure. On a visit to Thailand a few years later, Recktenwald says there were signs the government was putting in sensors and alarms to protect people from another disaster:
"You could see these sirens, on the beaches, and they had plaques at the bottom saying when they were constructed. They were all constructed in the years right after the tsunami, in '07 or '08."
Rajvee says the Indian government began putting in some tsunami sensors and warning systems, but as the money dried up, so did the desire to build expensive infrastructure. Rajvee says another tsunami would likely have the same level of damage and loss.
Recktenwald says he believes things are getting better – they’re not back to where they were yet, but he’s glad to watch the progress of the recovery both from here in the United States, and on visits back to the nation.
"Well, I think the area affected by the tsunami is doing much better. I have been in contact with about a half-dozen Sri Lankans, and watching them grow up is great fun now."
Ten years on, both men says lessons were learned from the Indian Ocean tsunami. But they say only time will tell whether those lessons will stick with the people and leaders of countries in that region.
