Tsunami Survivors Still Struggle

3 years after the Indian Ocean Earthquake of December 2004

“The sea is a different colour today - a Tsunami might come”, the old woman said, her eyes tinged with sadness as she sold bottled water from a counter in a long row of dilapidated shacks.

The scars of the 2004 Asian Tsunami can be seen everywhere. Besides the fear that remains in peoples faces, a nearby tree lay un-rooted whilst trucks trundle uncertainly across a rickety wooden bridge. The legs of the original concrete bridge, destroyed by 100 ft waves, stick out of the water like broken teeth.

Your local travel agent might have you believe that it’s all over, that the resorts have been rebuilt and it’s business as usual on Thailand’s Andaman coast. But cycle a few hundred meters outside of the resorts where Westerners enjoy cool Singha beers and the warm hospitality of the Thai people, and it’s a very different story.

• » See also: Javan Rhinos Confirmed in Vietnam!
• » Get EcoWorldly by RSS or sign up by email.

Many people have struggled to rebuild homes (unrecognisable as such by Western standards), and are having a hard time time living from the remaining natural resources which were devastated following an undersea earthquake so large that our Earth wobbled on its Axis and our days are now 2.7 microseconds shorter.

The human toll from the Tsunami came to 229,866 people lost, including 186,983 dead and 42,883 missing. Survivors continue to mourn their losses, left with farm fields still contaminated by salt water, limited infrastructure for the treatment of sewage and provision of fresh water and the collapse of local fishing industries.

The healthy return of tourism to the region is certainly helping to inject funds into local economies, and a sense of normality is slowly returning, but the memory of 26th December 2004 continues to traumatise many survivors struggling to scrape a living from a coastline still bearing many scars of the most deadly natural disaster in living memory.

Tweet This Post