My boat was meters from shore when the waves hit

Boxing Day, 2004.

When the earthquake struck at 06:30 (01:00 GMT), I was on a ferry heading towards Havelock – an island in the Indian Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.

Radhanagar Beach there is famous for its silver sand and clear blue waters, and was recently crowned “Asia’s Best Beach” by Time magazine.

My best friend from college and her family have lived in Port Blair, the archipelago’s capital, for a decade and a half, but this was my first visit to the islands, arriving on Christmas Eve.

We planned to spend three days in Havelock and in the morning we packed snacks and sandwiches, gathered the excited kids and headed out to catch the ferry from the Phoenix Bay jetty in Port Blair.

Not wanting to miss anything, I was standing on the front deck looking around when disaster struck.

As soon as we got out of the port, the boat lurched and suddenly the pier next to where we boarded collapsed and fell into the sea. This was followed by a watchtower and a power pole.

It was an unusual sight. Dozens of people standing next to me watched with open mouths.

Fortunately, the pier was deserted at the time, so there were no casualties. The boat was scheduled to leave from there within half an hour, but the passengers had not arrived yet.

One of the boat crew told me it was an earthquake. At the time I didn’t know, but the 9.1 magnitude earthquake was it Third strongest It has never been recorded in the world – and remains the largest and most destructive in Asia.

It occurred off the coast of northwest Sumatra under the Indian Ocean, unleashing a devastating tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people in more than a dozen countries and caused extensive damage in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives and Thailand.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located about 100 kilometers north of the quake’s epicenter, suffered severe damage when a wall of water up to 15 meters (49 feet) high in some places hit land only about 15 minutes later.

The official death toll was put at 1,310 – but with more than 5,600 people missing and presumed dead, more than 7,000 islanders are believed to have died.

However, while on the boat, we were oblivious to the extent of the devastation surrounding us. Our cell phones didn’t work on the water and we only got snippets of information from the crew. We heard about the damage to Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives – and the southern Indian coastal city of Nagapattinam.

But there was no information about Andaman and Nicobar, a group of hundreds of islands scattered in the Bay of Bengal, located about 1,500 kilometers (915 miles) east of mainland India.

Only 38 of them were inhabited. It was home to 400,000 people, including six groups of hunter-gatherers who lived cut off from the outside world for thousands of years.

Ferries were the only way to reach the islands, but, as we later learned, an estimated 94% of the piers in the area were damaged.

This is also the reason why we did not reach Havelock on 26 December 2004. We were told that the jetty there was damaged and under water.

So the boat turned around and set off on its return journey. For a while, there was speculation that we might not get permission to anchor in Port Blair for safety reasons and might have to spend the night at anchor.

This has passengers – most of whom are tourists looking forward to the sun and sand – worried.

After several hours of walking through rough seas, we returned to Port Blair. As Phoenix Bay was closed after damage in the morning, we were transferred to Chatham, another port in Port Blair. The platform we landed on had huge holes in places.

There were signs of devastation all around us as we made our way home – buildings were reduced to rubble, small boats were upended in the middle of the streets and the roads had huge cracks. Thousands of people became homeless when the tsunami flooded their homes in low-lying areas.

I met a traumatized nine-year-old girl whose house was filled with water and she told me she almost drowned. A woman told me that she lost her entire life’s possessions in the blink of an eye.

Over the next three weeks, I prepared extensive reports on the disaster and its effects on the population.

This was the first time a tsunami had caused such devastation in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the scale of the tragedy was enormous.

Salt water has polluted many fresh water sources and destroyed large areas of arable land. Getting vital supplies to the islands was difficult as the piers were unserviceable.

The authorities launched massive relief and rescue efforts. Army, navy and air force forces were deployed, but it took days before they were able to reach all the islands.

Every day, navy and coast guard ships ferried boatloads of people displaced by the tsunami from other islands to Port Blair, where schools and government buildings were turned into temporary shelters.

They brought stories of devastation to their homelands. Many told me they fled with nothing but the clothes they were wearing.

A Car Nicobar woman told me that when the earthquake struck, the ground began spewing foamy water at the same time as the waves came in from the sea.

She and hundreds of others from her village waited for rescuers without food or water for 48 hours. She said it was a “miracle” that she and her 20-day-old baby survived.

Port Blair was hit almost daily by aftershocks, some of which were strong enough to start rumors of new tsunamis, sending frightened people scrambling to reach higher ground.

A few days later, the Indian Army flew the journalists to Car Nicobar, a flat, fertile island known for its stunning beaches and home to a large Indian Air Force colony.

The deadly tsunami completely flattened the base. The water here rose 12 metres, and while most people were asleep, the ground gave away from under their feet. One hundred people died here. More than half of them were Air Force officers and their families.

We visited the island’s villages of Malacca and Kakan which also bore the brunt of nature’s fury, forcing residents to take shelter in tents along the way. Among them were families torn apart by the tsunami.

A grieving young couple told me they had managed to save their five-month-old child, but their other two children, aged seven and 12, had been swept away.

Every house surrounded by coconut trees on all sides was reduced to rubble. Among the scattered personal belongings were clothes, school books, a child’s shoes, and a musical keyboard.

The only thing that remains surprisingly intact is a bust of the father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi, at the traffic circle.

A senior army officer told us that his team recovered seven bodies that day and we watched the mass cremation from a distance.

At the air base, we watched rescuers pull the body of a woman from under the rubble.

One official said that for every body found in Car Nicobar, many more were washed away without a trace.

After all these years, I still sometimes think about the day I jumped on the ferry to go to Havelock.

I wonder what would have happened if the tremors had come a few minutes earlier.

What would have happened if the wall of water had crashed onto the shore while I was waiting on the pier to board the ferry?

On Boxing Day 2004, I had a close call. The thousands who died were not so lucky.

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