Twenty years later: ‘My boat was a few meters from the shore when the tsunami hit’

Boxing Day, 2004.

When the earthquake struck at 06:30 (01:00 GMT), I was on a ferry, headed to Havelock – an island in the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar.

Known for its silver sand and clear blue waters, Radhanagar beach was recently crowned “Asia’s Best Beach” by Time magazine.

My best friend from college and her family had lived in Port Blair, the archipelago’s capital, for a decade and a half, but this was my first visit to the islands, where I arrived on Christmas Eve.

We had planned to spend three days in Havelock and in the morning we packed snacks and sandwiches, collected the excited kids and set out to catch the ferry from the Phoenix Bay Jetty in Port Blair.

Not wanting to lose anything, I was standing on the front deck, looking around, when disaster struck.

As we left the port, the boat faltered and the pier next to which we had boarded suddenly broke and fell into the sea. After this there was a watchtower and an electric pole.

It was an extraordinary sight. Dozens of people standing with me kept staring with open mouths.

Thankfully, the ghat was deserted at that time so there were no casualties. A boat was going to leave from there in half an hour but the passengers had not yet arrived.

A member of the boat crew told me it was an earthquake. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a 9.1 magnitude earthquake. third most powerful It was – and remains – the largest and most destructive ever recorded in the world, in Asia.

Occurring under the Indian Ocean off the coast of northwest Sumatra, it unleashed a devastating tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people in more than a dozen countries and caused massive damage in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, and Thailand.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located about 100 km north of the epicenter, suffered widespread damage when a wall of water up to 15 meters (49 ft) high hit land about 15 minutes later.

The official death toll was reported at 1,310 – but with more than 5,600 missing and presumed dead, it is believed that more than 7,000 islanders died.

However, while on the boat, we were oblivious to the scale of destruction around us. Our mobile phones did not work on the water and we only got fragments of information from the crew. We heard about damage in Sri Lanka, Bali, Thailand and the Maldives – and in the southern Indian coastal town of Nagapattinam.

But there was no information about Andaman and Nicobar – a collection of hundreds of islands scattered in the Bay of Bengal, located about 1,500 km (915 miles) east of mainland India.

Only 38 of them were inhabited. They were home to 400,000 people, including six hunter-gatherer groups, who lived in isolation from the outside world for thousands of years.

The only way to reach the islands was by ferries, but, as we later learned, an estimated 94% of the ferries in the area were damaged.

This was the reason why we could never reach Havelock on 26 December 2004. We were told that the ghat there was damaged and submerged in water.

So the boat turned around and started on its return journey. There were speculations for some time that due to security reasons we would not be allowed to dock at Port Blair and we might have to spend the night at anchor.

This left passengers – most of them tourists waiting for sun and sand – worried.

After swimming in rough seas for several hours, we returned to Port Blair. Because Phoenix Bay was closed after the morning damage, we were diverted to Chatham, another port in Port Blair. The ghat where we were left had big holes at many places.

As we headed home the signs of devastation were all around us – buildings reduced to rubble, small overturned boats parked in the middle of the road and large pieces of debris strewn across the road. Thousands of people were left homeless when their homes were flooded by tidal waves in low-lying areas.

I met a shocked nine-year-old girl whose house was flooded and she told me she almost drowned. A woman told me that she had lost all the wealth of her life in the blink of an eye.

Over the next three weeks, I reported in detail on the disaster and its effects on the population.

This was the first time a tsunami had wreaked such havoc in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the scale of the tragedy was tremendous.

The salt water contaminated many sources of fresh water and destroyed large tracts of agricultural land. It was difficult to deliver vital supplies to the islands due to the ferries being unusable.

Authorities launched a massive relief and rescue effort. The Army, Navy and Air Force were deployed, but it took several days to reach all the islands.

Every day, Navy and Coast Guard ships loaded people displaced by the tsunami from other islands to Port Blair, where schools and government buildings were converted into temporary shelters.

They brought stories of devastation to their homeland. Many people told me that they had fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

A woman from Car Nicobar told me that when the earthquake happened, foamy water started coming out from the ground along with waves coming from the sea.

He and hundreds of others in his village waited for rescue workers for 48 hours without food or water. She said it was a “miracle” that she and her 20-day-old baby survived.

Tremors were experienced almost daily in Port Blair, some of them so strong that rumors of a fresh tsunami spread, sending frightened people fleeing to higher ground.

A few days later, the Indian Army flew journalists to Car Nicobar, a flat fertile island known for its picturesque beaches and also home to a large Indian Air Force colony.

The devastating tsunami completely destroyed the base. Here the water rose up to 12 meters and when most of the people slept, the ground slipped from under their feet. Hundred people died here. More than half were Air Force officers and their families.

We visited Malacca and Kakan villages on the island, which also bore the brunt of nature’s wrath, forcing residents to seek shelter in roadside tents. These included families torn apart by the tidal wave.

The grieving young couple told me that they managed to save their five-month-old child, but their other children aged seven and 12 were swept away.

Every house surrounded by coconut trees on all sides was reduced to debris. Scattered personal effects included clothing, textbooks, a child’s shoe, and a musical keyboard.

The only thing that remained – surprisingly intact – was a statue of the Father of the Indian Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, at a traffic intersection.

A senior army officer told us that his team had recovered seven bodies that day and we watched their mass cremation from a distance.

At the Air Force base we saw that rescue workers pulled out the body of a woman from the debris.

An official said that many of each body found in Car Nicobar had been washed away by the waves without leaving any trace.

After so many years, I still sometimes think about the day I boarded the ferry to Havelock.

I wonder what would have happened if the shaking had occurred a few minutes earlier.

And what if a wall of water had hit the shore while I was waiting at the pier to board my boat?

On Boxing Day, 2004, I had a close call. The thousands who died were not so lucky.

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