Twenty years ago, a catastrophic tsunami devastated communities across the Indian Ocean, resulting in the deaths of more than 220,000 people.
Triggered by a massive earthquake off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia—potentially the third most powerful ever recorded—the tsunami event is considered to be one of the world’s worst natural disasters.
Now, a seismologist who was on duty at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii when the disaster struck has revealed to Newsweek the inside story of how events played out that fateful day, as his team scrambled to inform regions in the crosshairs of the wave—with relatively little success—in an attempt to save lives thousands of miles away.
The seismologist, Barry Hirshorn, tells of the almost impossible situation his team found itself in—namely, trying to respond to a powerful tsunami event occurring in a completely different ocean to the one it was set up to monitor.
Hotli Simanjuntak/National Geographic
“So at that point, the biggest problem was that we were—and still are—the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.” Hirshorn told Newsweek. “There’s a whole structure in place. I call it a three-legged stool because you need all three legs to be successful—to increase your odds of successfully helping the coastal populations at risk after a tsunami.”
“I consider those three legs… as being the warning center, which has to detect and give you some idea of what you’re dealing with, the civil defense people who have to mobilize based on your information… as well as the population that they have to warn and that we warn,” he said. “At the time, we had none of these. It was the wrong ocean.”
In 2004, there were essentially no tsunami warning centers dedicated to monitoring the Indian Ocean, largely because this region was not expected to be at significant risk of a major tsunami.
“You always assume that most of your gigantic tsunamis are going to be in the Pacific,” Hirshorn said. “But more than that, there were no contact points for…
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