- Dec. 26th, 2004, begins like any Sunday in Southeast Asia.
Fishermen work on their boats, tourists awaken in Thailand beach hotels, Indonesian families sleep in.
Six miles beneath the ocean’s floor, tension that has built for centuries between two tectonic plates finally snaps at 7:58 a.m. The earthquake is 9.0 on the Richter scale, the largest in 41 years , the fifth largest in a century. More than 620 miles of Earth’s underwater crust jolts upward 33 feet, creating a massive push of water that races at 500 miles an hour toward land. It will smash coastlines of 11 countries, kill tens of thousands of people and leave more than a million homeless.
First in the path of the water is Indonesia, where many thought the earthquake was the big event.. Scientists later will estimate that, on the islands closest to the epicenter, the waves were 90 feet high.
The bucking earth awakes Ibrahim Ali , 42 . He jumps out of bed and grabs his 5-year-old daughter, who’s crying in the hallway. He yells to his wife to run from their duplex in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital on the northern tip of Sumatra, as the earthquake continues to rock.
Neighbors in the subdivision 1,500 feet from the ocean gather on the heaving ground and join in a common prayer – “There is no god but Allah. Allah is great.”
After 10 minutes the shaking stops, and Ali and his family head inside to assess the damage. The aquarium has spilled fish and water. The TV remote is soaked. Broken glass clutters the floor.
Ali grabs a cold cup of day-old coffee and lights a cigarette before starting to clean. Then he notices the ceiling is shaking.
Meanwhile, Ali’s 23-year-old half-brother, Nouvanda Satrya, is riding his motorcycle through Banda Aceh, looking for signs of earthquake destruction. He approaches an intersection and sees a massive wave heading toward a bridge.
“It was the same height as the bridge,” he says later. “I could hear it roaring, breaking wood. It’s like the movie ‘The Perfect Storm.'”
The wave swamps the concrete bridge, blowing it apart. Satrya turns his motorcycle to flee. He weaves through traffic, heads the wrong way up a street and knocks into people in his escape.
“I can hear the sounds of water hitting wood. Screaming animals. Screaming people asking for help. I didn’t want to look back.”
Ali, still inside his duplex, moves his eye from the shaking ceiling to the window. That’s when he sees a wall of water, brown, filled with wood and rocks, rolling toward his home.
There’s no time to run. He grabs his wife and daughter.
“Don’t be scared because I am here,” Ali says, holding his wife with his right hand and his daughter with his left. “Allah is great. There is no God but Allah.”
The tsunami hits, wiping out Ali’s home, carrying him and his family into the surging current. A piece of wood smashes Ali’s left shoulder, dislocating it. Another crushes his right index finger. He loses his grip.
“I cannot hold them any more,” he writes later in a journal.
Underwater, Ali believes it’s the end of days, prophesied in the Koran. He prays for Allah to let him die with his wife and daughter. But Ali catches limbs of a tree and holds on.
Neighbors’ bodies float by.
The water subsides. All that remains of his house is the ceramic tiled floor.
Ali crawls from pile to pile of debris, then spends weeks wandering hospital halls and camps of the homeless, searching the faces for his wife and daughter.
Three weeks after the tsunami, Ali stands before his home, pulls one of his wife’s veils from the mud. He holds it to his chest, lifts his head and cries.
“I don’t know why I am still alive,” he’ll write later in his journal. “Allah, I am trying to accept your test. There must be some meaning after all of this pain. Allah, please give me the heart to be strong.”
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