On 26 December 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake triggered one of the deadliest disasters in modern history. The Boxing Day Tsunami barreled across one-fifth of the world, impacting 14 countries. The tsunami killed a quarter of a million people and left over 2 million homeless.
We spoke to ShelterBox staff who experienced the destruction. Read below to hear from Daniel, Rachel, and Mark, and learn how the tsunami changed their lives.
Daniel
Daniel is an Emergency Coordinator for ShelterBox. At the time of the tsunami, he was on holiday in Sri Lanka with his now wife. It was this life-changing moment that led him to working in the humanitarian sector and later with ShelterBox.
“We woke to a person screaming out a warning. I pulled back the old bit of fabric serving as a curtain to see a great wall of white water, as tall as our single-story building. My wife can’t swim, so I spun around to grab her. I tried to lift her up onto a partition wall, but at that moment, the wave knocked down the front wall, and water crashed into us. The last I saw of that room was the roof dropping down on us before we were washed out through the rear wall of the building.” 
Daniel and his wife found safety by climbing onto debris that was wrapped around a tree.
“Within minutes, the water stopped surging. Then… it drew back to expose the sea floor, for as far as the eye could see. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. There was a bus on its side in a lagoon with people trapped. It was harrowing.
“My now wife and a small group of friends worked together to get those injured back to safety, all the time being fed and sheltered by families who had lost so much but still wouldn’t let us go hungry. We had lost everything including our passports. But at least we had our lives, and we were able to escape the chaos. Something that would sit with me for a long time.
“I always had a strong sense of service, but never a firm idea of how I wanted to apply it. This crisis was the catalyst for me wanting to get into the humanitarian sector. Getting into the sector was difficult, and I think I had some healing to do.”
Rachel
Rachel was the BBC’s Indonesia correspondent and had been based in Jakarta since November 2002 when the earthquake struck. Rachel later joined the humanitarian sector, initially as a volunteer for ShelterBox, and now works as our emergency preparedness lead.
“We got into Aceh (Indonesia) two days after the tsunami hit and none of us was prepared for what we witnessed.
“This was the largest disaster I had covered in terms of impact and news interest. Nothing else had even come close. The scale of it was of course a big factor: the number of fatalities, the level of physical destruction; the number of countries impacted. I think the timing also played a part. Lots of tourists on holiday in Thailand and Sri Lanka; Christmas period with all that entails; and people off work and watching telly / listening to the radio more than usual.
“I had seen a few boxes in Aceh with the ShelterBox logo and an address in Helston. It caught my eye because I’m originally from Cornwall. Later, I reported on the ShelterBox response to catastrophic flooding in Thailand in 2011. When I decided to leave the BBC, I applied to join as a volunteer response team member to see what it was like to be on the other side of that fence, trying to improve the situation of people affected by disasters rather than reporting on them. Six years and several diversions later, I joined the staff of ShelterBox.”
“Shelter is so fundamental. We tend to think about the physical importance of shelter – protection from the elements, animals, insects, somewhere to sleep etc. But the psychological importance of a place to call your own, something approximating a home, somewhere to be private, to be a family, to find routine and order during the chaotic aftermath of a disaster, is often overlooked and equally critical.”
Mark
Mark Boeck was one of the first volunteer response team members for ShelterBox. A firefighter at the time, he answered ShelterBox’s appeal for volunteers and started by packing boxes of aid in our then warehouse in Helston before deploying to Indonesia in April 2005.
“I was one of ShelterBox’s first volunteers, responding to the Boxing Day Tsunami. People on the small Indonesian island of Simeulue had yet to receive support from other humanitarian organisations, so we travelled there to deliver aid to affected families.”
“We all had experience as firefighters, but not disaster relief work. It was all new. We were learning as we went. We loaded the boxes onto a small ferry from the main island and made the journey across the water. With no accommodation booked, we sought out a small guest house which had been damaged in the earthquake. This was home for the next two weeks.
“When we arrived in April, people had been living in temporary makeshift shelters for three or four months, salvaging what they could from damaged buildings, using materials like corrugated iron and timber.
“This was my first deployment with ShelterBox, and it sparked my motivation to get more involved with humanitarian work. I became a permanent volunteer for ShelterBox from that moment and have deployed 12 times to disasters around the world. All of them have been memorable in one way or another. Some have been memorable because of the total destruction, others because of the way ShelterBox staff and volunteers undertake their duties. But most memorable of all is the resilience of the affected communities.”
20 years later
We have come a long way in the 20 years since the Boxing Day Tsunami. We have supported 3 million people worldwide, operated in around 100 countries, and have moved away from our iconic green boxes. But our mission has always remained the same – to see no person without shelter after disaster.
