It was white water and chaos – Boxing Day tsunami survivor

A survivor of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami has recalled the moment he was awoken by “screaming and shouting” – two decades on from one of the deadliest disasters ever recorded.

Daniel Poole, from Perranporth in Cornwall, had been on a surfing trip to Sri Lanka when a 9.1-magnitude earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami, which claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

Mr Poole is among those who have been looking back on their role in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Asia.

Firefighter Mark Boeck, from Cornwall, and Rachel Harvey, from near Totnes, Devon, were among those who helped the rescue mission launched by Cornish charity Shelterbox.

Mr Poole, now aged 44, recalled the moment the waves crashed into the “idyllic” seaside guesthouse he had been sharing with his now wife.

He said all he could see was “white water and chaos”.

“I leapt out of bed to the window to see a great wall of white water, as tall as our single-storey building,” he said.

“It wouldn’t stop. My wife can’t swim, so I spun around to grab her.

“The very next second the wave smashed through the front wall.

“The last I saw of that room was the roof dropping down on us before we were washed out through the rear wall of the building, the compound wall, across a ditch, road and 150m [490ft] into the jungle before surfacing again.”

Mr Poole said he and his partner managed to get out of the water after scrambling onto a pile of debris that had wrapped around a tree.

Approximately 230,000 people lost their lives in 14 countries across Southeast Asia and South Asia, and as far as eastern and southern Africa following the disaster.

Now an emergency co-ordinator with Truro-based disaster-relief charity ShelterBox, Mr Poole said the Boxing Day tsunami had a significant impact on how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments dealt with disasters.

He said: “One of the big lessons was the need for countries to invest in reducing the risk of future disasters, like warning systems.”

He added: “We’re pushing harder and harder on the messaging that there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster’.

Rachel Harvey, from near Totnes in south Devon, had been working as a foreign correspondent in Jakarta, Indonesia, for about two years when the earthquake struck.

Ms Harvey, now aged 59, recalled the horror she saw after travelling to Banda Aceh to cover the disaster.

“Buildings completely destroyed, piles of rubble, boats in places they shouldn’t naturally have been, dead bodies everywhere… Things your brain is almost refusing to process,” she said.

“The roads and ports were also damaged, which meant that we weren’t able to see how bad things were further down the coast.”

Ms Harvey, who also joined ShelterBox as a result of her experience covering the impact of the tsunami, said it was important to look back on the event 20 years on to learn from it – and hopefully improve the efficiency and quality of responses to disasters.

She said: “I saw for myself after the tsunami just how chaotic and messy a big humanitarian response can be.

“The need for better co-ordination was really stark during the tsunami, and that has improved since.”

Firefighter Mark Boeck, was one of the team who joined fledgling charity Shelterbox, when it sent a team into the disaster zone.

Mr Boeck said: “We saw whole villages wiped out from the coast all the way inland.

“There was so much damage, so much destroyed, so many lives lost.”

The small Indonesian island of Simeulue had not received any support from other humanitarian organisations, Mr Boeck said, so the team “travelled there to deliver aid to affected families”.

He said: “We all had experience as firefighters, but not disaster relief work.”

The charity only offered one option at the time, “the box and its contents”, which he said normally meant it was only “families whose homes had been totally destroyed that received our aid”.

The charity’s initial work saw it sending its well-known green boxes of aid to people made homeless by natural or man-made disasters across the world.

Each box contained a 10-person tent and survival equipment, including sleeping bags, pots and stove, water purifying tablets and a basic tool kit.

Mr Boeck said: “We now work with local communities to find out what they need, and we have different ways we can support people, from shelter kits – containing items like tarpaulins, rope and tools – to cash assistance.”

The charity relies on donations, with half of its funding coming from the British public and the rest from oversee partners.

The charity said it retained the same core mission, to support people caught in disasters and conflict zones around the world.