On Christmas Day 2004, Chris Xaver arrived for a short vacation in Phuket, a popular tourist destination on the southwest coast of Thailand. It was already dark when she and her then-husband Scott arrived at the hotel; she couldn’t see the ocean, but could smell the salt water of a beach vacation. The next morning, she had just stepped out of the shower when the water began to flood their sea-level bungalow. They thought the water pipe was broken and called reception. No answer. Outside the bungalow they saw the remains of what they assumed was a malevolent wave. “The lexicon, the word tsunami, was not in our brains,” Xaver recalled.
Twenty years later, she remembers standing in an open-air beach restaurant, about 40 feet behind Scott, and seeing another wave approaching. As a journalist by training, she took out her camera to capture it. Through the lens, she watched as the wave picked up a Toyota pickup and carried it toward her. “It wasn’t a wall of water, like a Hawaii Five-0 with a curve,” she recalled. ‘It was just water coming at you. I will never, ever forget it.” She had enough time to scream at her husband and jump onto a beach chair before she was underwater.
Related: Tsunami: Race Against Time review – a gripping, moving look at the worst natural disaster of our lifetimes
The two minutes she was swept away by the tsunami on Boxing Day were “the fastest, slowest period of my life,” she says in Tsunami: Race Against Time, a new documentary series from National Geographic about the worst natural disaster of our lifetimes. Xaver is one of many survivors to share her experiences in the four-part series, which expertly collects personal testimonies and archival images of unfathomable devastation, fear, human kindness and loss. The deadliest tsunami in history, caused by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, on the morning of December 26, struck 14 countries around the Indian Ocean, from Thailand to Sri Lanka to Tanzania, killing more than 225,000 people. .
This continues well into the age of personal video, but at the dawn of the social media age there is much first-hand evidence of this bizarre, terrible disaster, although it took years for the extent of its devastation to be fully appreciated understood. Yet some images of the tsunami are now familiar and terrifying: people wandering the exposed beach as the water receded, unaware of the approaching wave; a wall of brown water that pulverizes cars, buildings, windows and everything in its path; floating masses of debris; terrible swirling water as high as the roofs.
Tsunami: Race Against Time features many of these images and the testimonies of those who endured the ocean’s gruesome game of chance. It also includes stories and archive footage of places less known to Western news audiences, who heard mainly from English-speaking tourists in hard-hit Thailand. “One of the first things we wanted to do was uncover archives from places we haven’t seen before, like Sri Lanka and Banda Aceh, Indonesia in particular, and also a lot of archives from Thailand that had never been shown before. rather,” said director Daniel Bogado. Bogado, who previously directed a similar witness-based, minute-by-minute docuseries about 9/11, led a team of researchers, producers and local fixers – many of whom survived the tsunami or lost loved ones – who spent months searching for sources never found. -previously shown archive footage, and the people in it, from all affected countries. The investigation was “a labor of love,” Bogado said. “It’s just a tremendous amount of work that goes into before you even film a single interview.”
Told in four episodes, the stories center on a woman who saw her family’s house fill with water on the morning of her wedding in Banda Aceh, Indonesia – the first major city to be hit and which was already on fire that morning. was recovering from the damage from the earthquake. A hospital in Sri Lanka, which, in a terrible quirk of science, was hit by broken waves on all sides of the island. A survivor of a Sri Lankan train that, due to the unprecedented nature of the disaster and the lack of warning systems, rushed straight into the tsunami, killing 1,700 people – the worst railway disaster in history. A man who pulled a toddler from the wreckage in Indonesia, but lost track of her in hospital. Barry Hirshorn, a seismologist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, who understood the danger of the tsunami when it occurred but was limited to trying to reach foreign governments via landline because of the patchwork of warning systems. People who lost their brothers and sisters, parents and friends; people who thought they had lost their loved ones, but miraculously found them in the wreckage.
Although she was thrown against a wall by water and impaled by porch furniture, Xaver was one of the lucky ones. The force of the water subsided before she lost consciousness and although she was badly injured, she was able to get up. Her husband, who was pulled from the water by another tourist, also survived. Thanks to a hotel shuttle and triage care by fellow travelers, they were able to escape another wave and reach a hospital in Phuket, and then another hospital in Bangkok. After being readmitted to the hospital weeks later for a gangrenous infection, she eventually emerged relatively physically unscathed. But the damage lingers. “There’s a tremendous amount of guilt that comes with surviving something when great people didn’t,” she said. “You just really have to grapple with all that guilt – why am I here, and then what is my responsibility for being here? If I get this opportunity, I better do something with it.”
In the years that followed, Xaver felt obliged to share her story. “If you survive this, you have to share it somehow because it is too big and has affected too many lives,” she said. Many others who participated in the series felt the same way, Bogado said. “The pitch we made to people was always quite similar, which was that this documentary will primarily serve as a historical record” – especially important because much of the footage from that time was on the verge of being lost, so not already affected by moisture or decay. Twenty years, it turns out, is more than many hard drives can survive.
And second, the series serves as a “commemoration of the lives that were lost,” according to Bogado. Only a handful are remembered here in detail, gutted piece by piece, by people willing to relive, in empathetic and harrowing detail, the worst day of their lives, still unbelievable twenty years later.
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Tsunami: Race Against Time is available on Disney+ and also on Hulu in the US
