Twenty years after the deadliest tsunami in history, survivors and relatives of victims are preparing to commemorate tomorrow, December 26, the same day in 2004 that giant waves hit the coasts of countries bordering the Indian Ocean, killing over 220 thousand people.
A magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent huge waves crashing across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries in the Indian Ocean, causing casualties as far away as Somalia.
At maximum speed, the waves reached 800 kilometers per hour and a maximum height of 30 meters, equivalent to a 10-story building, releasing an energy equal to 23,000 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
In total, the tsunami killed 226,408 people, according to Em-Dat, an accredited global disaster database.
Memorial ceremonies will be held across the region on beaches where many Western tourists who came to celebrate Christmas in the sun also lost their lives. More than 5,000 people have died in Thailand, half of them foreign tourists, and another 3,000 are still missing.
An exhibition on the tsunami has been set up at a hotel in Phang Nga province and a documentary will be shown, while government and UN officials will talk about disaster prevention and management. December 26, 2004 marked a turning point in this regard, since, according to experts, the lack of a properly coordinated warning system greatly aggravated the consequences of the disaster.
Since then, around 1,400 monitoring stations around the world have reduced the warning time after the formation of a tsunami to just a few minutes. (A2 Televizion)
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MUND TE LEXONI GJITHASHTU
