20 Years Later, New Documentary Looks at Deadliest Tsunami in History

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, it was one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern times. 20 years ago, a massive tsunami in southern Asia triggered a 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Indonesia, killing more than 200,000 people in 14 countries. A new documentary called “Tsunami: Race Against Time” looks back at that devastating day, the 26th of December, 2004, with never-before-seen footage. Here’s a bit of the trailer.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People were on the street. Suddenly, I can see this really high water. And I just like, what is that?

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GOLODRYGA: Hari Sreenivasan sits down with director producer Daniel Bogado and seismologist Barry Hirshorn for more.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Daniel Bogado, Barry Hirshorn. Thank you both for joining us. Your new documentary, “Tsunami: Race Against Time,” it’s about the devastating tsunami that came across a huge swath of the planet about 20 years ago. Daniel, I guess first, what drew you to this topic?

DANIEL BOGADO, DIRECTOR AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, “TSUNAMI: RACE AGAINST TIME”: Well, I suppose it’s the 20th anniversary. So, it’s difficult to believe, but it’s been 20 years since it happened. And I remember at the time it happens waking up on the 26th of December and the scale of the tragedy. A lot of people forget we lost nearly a quarter of a million people in one day. So, we had this idea of doing one series, which would be focusing on the day, only with video archive of the day, and just basically mainly listening from survivors and people who experienced that. And it took many years to put together, but we thought it was something that was very important to do. We traveled to Indonesia to Thailand, Sri Lanka, we knocked on a lot of doors, TV stations, and we found hundreds of hours of video footage that had never been shown before anywhere. But that was only the first part of the job, because after that, we saw people in the video archive and we wanted to find them and track them down so we could hear directly from them their story. So, that was a whole separate challenge.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Then there was a shout, the sea is coming, the sea is coming. But it looked like it’s coming gently. Suddenly, everybody started

running. And then —

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SREENIVASAN: Barry, you were working in Hawaii at the time, you know, 8,000 miles away from where this earthquake that triggered the tsunami happened. You’re working at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

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BARRY HIRSHORN, AMERICAN SEISMOLOGIST ON DUTY DURING TSUNAMI: We have a magnitude eight and we’re trying to reanalyze the magnitude with more data. And then, we got a magnitude 8.5. And although you think of 8.5 versus 8, so what, .5, right? The earthquake magnitude scale is a logarithmic scale. And each difference in magnitude is about a 30-time increase in energy.

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SREENIVASAN: So, we’re talking about something that is almost the length of California under the sea, that essentially two big plates are shifting up. And so, when this part of the Earth goes up or down, that means, what, the wave, that’s a column of water super high was all that energy lifts up those millions and billions of pounds and whatever of water and makes them fall over. Is that what’s happening in a tsunami?

HIRSHORN: Yes, it essentially lifts them and then lifts in a gigantic pulse. But one of the things I think very important to understand when you get to earthquakes of this size is there is a fairly common perception that earthquakes occur at a point in the Earth. And the reality is — especially, they occur along rupture zones. For example, this one, a rupture zone, the length of — roughly the length of California. So, if you can imagine that gigantic column of water that you mentioned lifting, keep taking successive columns of water comparable to that over a period of nine or 10 minutes, successively lifting — as the fault ruptures to the northeast, successive columns of water. So, you’ve got multiple tsunami sources that all combine coming from this gigantic fault.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I saw an elderly couple. So, I thought that, oh, I have to go down there and to help them.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That’s (INAUDIBLE) a good 15, 20 feet tall. Easy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This elderly couple were hanging on to a railing. I tried to reach them. And they just disappeared.

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SREENIVASAN: Barry, there are periods in the documentary where you can see how really anguished you and your staff are realizing that you just don’t have the information from the other side of the planet that could help you help more people. What was — what were the things that started to — you know, what were the pieces of information that started to trickle in where you understood really the magnitude, for lack of a better term, of what was happening so far away?

HIRSHORN: The one that really drove the point home to me was a train, which is not a featherweight object. A train is a very massive, massive thing. Inland, from the tsunami, in Sri Lanka, something like three or four — two or three hours travel time away from the source, that drove the point home that we were dealing with something extremely — I would say that was an order of magnitude jump in a nerd science speaking, like in our awareness. And I’d like to point out that at that time the director did something which I suppose was an advantage of having scientists on duty for these events. He’s a seismologist and a water level person and he was able to generate on the fly a map that showed the tsunami travel times every hour for the Indian Ocean, which of course we did not have. And so, this combination of this Uber realization, if you want to call it, this step-in realization of the magnitude combined with a tool that value was hard to — is infinitely valuable in that situation because you can now focus the energy and personnel you have on places ahead of the wave critical. Now, we knew roughly where the wave was with time.

SREENIVASAN: Daniel, Barry mentioned this train. I want to touch on it for a second. But the story of the train Sri Lanka is so fascinating, partly because just — you know, we take for granted that you and I can text each other today and give each other a warning about something that might be down the road or ahead of you, but this is one of the worst train disasters in human history. And so, few people actually made it out of there. And yet, you were able to track down one of the survivors and really have her share this incredibly powerful story of her own.

BOGADO: Yes. I mean, an interesting detail about that train is that they actually did get warning about it, that they were heading straight to the tsunami. But unfortunately, by the time they got the warning and they tried to call the train, there was no way to communicate with anybody on the train. So, the people in the station, just as it left, had a warning. And you’re right, if it happened today, they would be able to mobile phones to pass on that communication. And yes, we interviewed Eranthy (ph) who was — who gave us — so many of these contributors, you know, just an incredibly contribution that came from the heart. Talked about her relationship with her mother, who was in the train and the events that transpired. And so, in a way, the whole project, really — because it’s largely voices just from people survived who run you minute by minute, the events that happens to them, it takes for them a lot of courage to do that. A lot of courage to go back and revisit what is the worst day of their lives, without a doubt. And I guess that the pitch we gave to them was that what we were trying to do with this series, we were trying, first of all, for — to create something for the historical record. You know, to — for future generations to be able to look back and understand this is what happened that day. And then, the second reason was for it to serve as a memorial for the lives that were lost, and hopefully, for people to become more educated about tsunamis, because I think if there was greater knowledge about the red flags, about the warning signs many, many more lives could have been saved.

SREENIVASAN: The layer of catastrophic damage that came after the first wave, in these subsequent waves, and you were able to capture that in so many different locations.

BOGADO: I think there are a lot of myths and misunderstandings surrounding tsunamis from what we see on television, what we see on films. We — imagine it’s just one wave, a gigantic wave, the size of a city coming. And it’s just simply not like that. We follow the experiences of a woman who wakes up, and when she goes up out of her hotel room, the first wave has arrived already. And so, there’s just water everywhere. People are confused. And a lot of people don’t understand as the water is heading back that that means another wave is coming, and a lot of people congregate on the beach wondering what’s going on when all of those are red flags that they should leave. They should find higher ground because another wave might come and then another one and another one. And by taking the audience through that journey so, they see minute by minute how it played out, we hope it’s in a way educational for people. And when they encounter the same thing, they have a much better idea what to do.

SREENIVASAN: Barry, how are we today as a planet compared 20 years ago if right now a tsunami was to be happening because of an earthquake somewhere far away?

HIRSHORN: Better than we were then. This earthquake sparked a revolution in seismology, a revolution in seismology science, which is also coupled with a revolution that would have happened anyway. As we all know, in communications, telemetry in sensor technology and computer technology, we have very, very fast methods based on geodetic and seismic instruments and advances and all the above that use the initially arriving energy and the — we can now tell you it’s a nine. We could have said that was event was a nine before it was complete, before the event was over, which would have given the — even the closest coast some warning, maybe five or 10 minutes, which is completely unheard of back then. I mean, it’s just no comparison. Now, the other case besides this far field is the much, much more difficult near field problem, where most of the casualties, of course, are. And there’s been tremendous progress there too.

SREENIVASAN: Daniel, you were able to find survivors, first responders in these places. Some of them are so far off where even the people didn’t even know whether they were going to be rescued or not, whether they were going to be stranded. What stood out to you as you listen to their stories, you looked over their footage?

BOGADO: Yes, well, I think that there’s a number of things. What was quite interesting is that, you know, this was a cataclysmic event, which affected so many people in so many different countries, some people with very, very different backgrounds. And so, it was an opportunity for the series to just explore the perspectives of all of these different people. Many times speaking in their own language directly to the audience.And then you start seeing some commonalities, all these people who get so close to the line separating life from death. And, you know, on those last moments, a lot of people, what they’re thinking of the — you know, they’re thinking of their loved ones, right, or all the small trivialities of life to just fade away. And that’s something that you see across countries and across different backgrounds. But then, the other thing that people saw in the aftermath was the way just that people came together to help each other. And again, that was a commonality wherever you saw, these were all the stories, in Thailand, in Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. So, there’s something about these events that just really make clear for people what really matters. And also, that just really show that other side of the human condition, this drive that we all have to want to help one another. And that just becomes very, very clear in situations like the day of the tsunami.

SREENIVASAN: All right. Seismologist Barry Hirshorn and filmmaker, director, and executive producer, Daniel Bogado. The film is called “Tsunami: Race Against Time.” You can watch it streaming now on national geographic or Disney Plus. Thank you both for joining us.

BOGADO: Thank you very much.

HIRSHORN: Thank you. Take care.