How the Boxing Day tsunami 20 years ago changed the lives of two Cornish men
On December 26 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake under the sea triggered one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
The Boxing Day Tsunami slammed in to 14 countries around the Indian Ocean, including Sri Lanka, where Daniel Poole from Perranporth was on a surf trip.
Daniel recalled the moment the tsunami struck - “Boxing Day morning we were woken to the sounds of shouting, primal screams, I jumped up, and pulled the cloth back and looked out and we could see this big wall of white water coming in across the sea, it was bigger than any of the waves that we'd been surfing."
He added "It marched over where we were staying, we were kind of swept off our feet by the water, and then the roof dropped down onto us, and that's the last like the last time I remember seeing the room and being above water for a couple of seconds when we get washed through the back wall of the building and then through the compound wall, all of this were under water and then across a service ditch and then a road and then we were swept up into the jungle."
"I grabbed my partner and I managed to get her up onto this pile of debris where she could be out of the water, I managed to climb up and her, and we just kind of looked around and the sea was just below us, it was all of a sudden in a whole new position, it was just the strangest thing".
When Daniel returned home he said he carried around a lot of fear “when we first came back my partner and I couldn’t even be on the beach when there were stormy seas. One of my best mates took me for a surf soon after and I remember being so scared, but time was able to heal”.
The experience of being swept up in the tsunami changed the course of Daniel’s life and led him to work in the humanitarian aid sector, now with the Cornish charity ShelterBox.
“As an emergency co-ordinator, I get to go around the world supporting communities after disaster to help them get back into shelter, which is that first springboard to recovery and I suppose it's calibrated me to that being that's like a North Star, you know, wanting to help people".
The apocalyptic scenes of destruction were an impetus to act for many including Mark Boeck, a Cornish firefighter at the time, who volunteered to deliver aid to Indonesia in April 2005.
Mark said he was shocked by the devastation he witnessed “seeing how people live or how they're coping, having lost everything, but also the resilience in those individuals and how they're just ready to to pick up and move on and what we were able to provide, albeit very little at the time, gave at least 300 families shelter”.
Tsunami: The Wave That Shook the World airs on 27 December on ITV1 and ITVX.