It isn’t easy for humanity to make sense of a natural disaster on the magnitude of the December 26th South Asian tsunami. The Western world in particular has had its notion of a benign and caring Mother Earth shattered by this event. Our cute and cuddly, Disney-like view of the world, à la Nemo, Bambi, Lion King and The Jungle Book, has had a rude awakening. We have now swung our mental pendulum to the other extreme. For days after the tragedy, headlines world-wide screamed of “nature’s wrath”, “a dark and evil thing”, “the ocean’s fury”, and the “merciless sea”.
But is Nature really capable of being kind or cruel; or is she just indifferent? The 158,000 or more people in this part of the world that lost their lives, and the millions more that were affected by the tsunami, were not being punished by some vengeful god. They were simply in the path of destruction caused by a periodic, if not totally predictable, natural event.
Children are taught from kindergarten to look in both directions for traffic before crossing a street. Fire drills are regularly practised in schools around the world, and there are well-rehearsed emergency procedures for tornado warnings, hurricanes, bombing raids and other possible disasters. So why do we in the modern age fail to inform our children of the most telltale sign of an impending tsunami?
There are chilling photos and video footage of hundreds of tourists in Thailand, on the morning of 26 December, following the rapidly receding water right into the path of destruction. They were exploring tide pools and stranded fish when they should have been moving inland and to high ground as fast as they could. Eyewitnesses at Khao Lak, Thailand’s worst disaster area, where thousands lost their lives, estimate that the sea was receding for a full five to eight minutes before it came surging back in as killer waves. That period should have been sufficient, had anyone been educated in the only visible sign of an impending tsunami, to evacuate everyone from the beach and warn those in restaurants and hotel rooms. Simply put: “When the ocean pulls its plug, head for the hills.”
The animals knew what to do. Eight elephants at Khao Lak that were transporting tourists as the sea started to recede suddenly ignored all the prodding orders from their mahouts and charged up the jungle-clad hill behind the beach resorts. Those elephants not engaged with tourists at the time are said to have broken their chains in their panic to follow. The entire herd stopped running just above the point on the hill that the highest wave reached.
Water buffalo grazing along the beach of Baan Bang Koey, in Ranong Province, are credited with saving an entire village. According to the village headman, about 100 buffalo were grazing near the beach when the entire herd suddenly lifted their heads in unison and, with ears standing upright, looked out to sea. They then turned and stampeded up the hill, forcing bewildered villagers, fearful of losing their livestock, to follow. Khun Kornee said that within minutes of people making their way to the safety of the hilltop, the tsunami slammed into their fishing community and destroyed it.
Animals, both domesticated and wild, may have some sort of genetic imprinting that allows them to sense imminent natural disasters. Or they may just have far more acute vision, hearing, olfactory senses, and an ability to flee faster than humans. At Yala National Park, in Sri Lanka, wildlife officials were surprised to find no evidence of large-scale animal deaths from the massive waves that slammed into this coastal refuge to leave the bodies of tens of thousands of humans in its wake. Yala is Sri Lanka’s largest wildlife reserve, home to more than 200 Asian elephants, crocodile, wild boar, water buffalo, gray langur monkeys, and Asia’s highest concentration of leopards.
An Associated Press photographer who flew over Yala National Park in an air force helicopter shortly after the tsunami retreated was amazed to see abundant wildlife and not a single animal corpse. The tsunami hit the park with such force that it uprooted trees and left cars atop the roofs of park facilities, but the animals, having apparently fled to the safety of higher ground, were unharmed.
When Nature’s cycles occur with enough regularity, we’re usually clever enough creatures ourselves to keep out of harm’s way. No one would build a house, for instance, in a flood zone where a river bursts its banks annually — at least no one would insure it, if they did. Earthquakes and tsunamis are the least predictable of all natural disasters, but they still occur with enough regularity for plants, animals and indigenous humans to have learned to cope with them over time. Just look at the aftermath images of the tsunami-devastated coasts in South Asia, if you want a lesson in how superbly adapted coconut trees are to withstanding tidal waves. The tall slender trunks of these palms offer little resistance to the force of the waves. Only old and rotted trees, or very young ones with their fronds at wave height, were toppled. In many coastal areas, coconut palms were the only things left standing.
Tsunamis are not only the rarest of natural disasters; they are also the most deceptive. Impossible to predict their impact with any degree of certainty, they travel at the speed of a jet and hide the energy of a hydrogen bomb in an almost imperceptible swell. On the geological time clock, they are as common as the tide, although in human time they may only occur once every generation or two.
In the past, humans held a great deal of tsunami sense in ancient wisdom passed on through oral traditions. Indigenous peoples, for instance, still know where to locate their homes to remain safe. The Penan, the last nomadic forest dwellers in Borneo, never build their sulaps — their elevated sleeping shelters — beneath a big tree for fear of limbs breaking or the tree toppling during a tropical storm. Similarly, coastal villages were traditionally built above broad tidal flats or inside mangrove estuaries. Both locations not only offer superior food gathering potential, but provide a good deal more protection from storms and tsunamis than the exposed coast.
Long tidal flats can completely steal the power of huge waves, as they must break repeatedly on the flat before ever reaching shore. So too do mangrove forests with their myriad channels and maze of roots act as efficient shock absorbers to tame tsunamis long before they reach villages perched on stilts behind the mangrove barrier. Ranong, the province with the most extensive mangroves in South Thailand, sustained the least damage. By contrast, Patong Beach, Ton Sai Bay on Phi Phi Island and Khao Lak, the hardest hit shores in Thailand, offered no protection from tsunamis at all. These sites are the quintessential picture postcard tourist beaches, but they drop off dangerously fast into deep Andaman waters and they are sitting ducks for tsunamis. Only a resort developer oblivious to the danger, or seeking to profit in spite of it, would build at such a location. There’s now talk of zoning Thailand’s Andaman coast so future developments do not leave tourists vulnerable, but no Thais or foreigners that have lived here for long hold much faith in these assurances.
It’s remarkable how the people in this region that are universally regarded as the least educated and most archaic were the most successful survivors of this tsunami. Asia’s last Paleolithic tribes in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were close to the epicentre of the earthquake, and were one of the regions first and hardest hit by the colossal waves that followed. Still, there seems to be little or no loss of life among their populations. Survival International, a London-based group that tries to defend the world’s indigenous peoples, reported that the Jarawa, the Onge, the Sentinelese and the Great Andamanese may have suffered no loss of life at all. Traditional teachings instructed the people to flee the coast to high ground at the first sign of rapidly receding waters.
A report from the first over-flight of Sentinel Island, home to the most isolated of these tribes, indicated that the inhabitants not only survived the wave, but had no use for the world’s relief efforts. The Sentinelese greeted the rescue helicopter that flew over their island — which is impossible to reach by sea — with a barrage of poisoned arrows and rocks.
Right here in Thailand, indigenous people are credited with saving hundreds of lives thanks to their traditional teachings. Staff on Koh Surin National Park, near the Thai/Myanmar border, reported that not only did the two villages of Moken (Sea Gypsies) located on Koh Surin save themselves from the tsunami that hit the outer islands with full force, but they also saved 270 foreign and Thai tourists who were camping on the beach. “The elders told us that, if the water recedes fast, it will reappear in the same quantity in which it disappeared,” 65-year-old village chief Sarmao Kathalay told the press. The Moken shared this time-honoured life-saving knowledge with hundreds of clueless tourists, some of whom had attended some of the world’s best institutions of higher learning.
Why does modern education so completely fail us at times like this? Part of the answer lies in the fact that we’ve become increasingly urbanized creatures, far removed from the forces and rhythmical cycles of Nature. We also tend to turn not to the teachings of our past, but to modern technology to save us.
A tsunami early warning system for South Asia, like that already in place for the Pacific, is long overdue and well worth the estimated 40 million euros it will cost to install. But the question that begs to be asked, and no one seems to be asking, is why don’t we also build good tsunami sense into our school curriculums worldwide?
Even people who don’t live near the coast at one time or another visit a shoreline out of curiosity or at a holiday time, as do millions of foreign tourists that descend on South Thailand annually. It would cost nothing to implement a tsunami education programme from the youngest school age on, and it would be the best and most lasting legacy to those who so tragically, and needlessly, lost their lives.

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