A survivor talks about his experience of the devastating flood in Thailand.

As always on the second day of Christmas, Frank Wetzing holds a small ceremony on the beach of Khao Lak. With his wife Land and two sons, he draws a heart in the sand and fills it with candles, lights incense and says prayers.

But let’s remember what happened. It is December 26, 2004, a sunny day in southern Thailand. Many tourists flock to the beaches of the Andaman Sea. Suddenly the earth starts shaking. The epicenter of the massive 9.1-magnitude undersea earthquake – the third strongest ever recorded – was off the western coast of North Sumatra in the Indian Ocean.

At the time, no one could imagine the magnitude of the natural disaster that was about to hit the coasts of several neighboring countries. The evidence is incredible. More than 230,000 people died, most of them in Aceh province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. But other countries, from Sri Lanka to India and Tanzania, recorded countless deaths. In Thailand at least 5,400 people lost their lives, of which over 500 were Germans.

Fear and panic

The then 39-year-old Frank Wetzing was in the house they had rented in Thailand with his parents. They planned to stay until January to celebrate his father’s 75th birthday and his own 40th. Immediately after the terrible earthquake, the power suddenly goes out. He answers three times. Voices are heard outside, louder and louder. People run in fear in front of Frank’s kitchen window, cars honking. “We didn’t know what to do and then we heard a very strange noise, like a train.”

The Germans are confused, but they have not yet realized the gravity of the situation. How could they possibly understand? At one point, his mother said the water was coming “but we didn’t think about a tsunami. We still thought we would be safer indoors,” he says. But the water rose sharply, the windows broke and the wave overwhelmed the house.

Frank can’t say how long he was in the water in the bungalow. Everything around him was pitch black, he remembers. He believed that he would not be able to survive and see the birth of his child. But he managed to get to the surface of the water, just under the roof of the bungalow. He climbed a tree with a floating mattress and was naked from the waist up. But they were among the lucky ones who managed to live.

Nothing beats disaster…

Today at his home in Thailand he has built a rescue tower, in which his guests could take refuge should the worst happen. In Khao Lak, however, today nothing reminds of the huge disasters that happened back then. Meanwhile, tsunami shelters have been built everywhere and special routes have been designed to be used in case of evacuations. In addition, residents are informed of impending dangers.

Photos and flowers at the Memorial Park in Ban Nam Khem remind today of the then terrible disaster with thousands of dead. But the Indian Ocean is calm and no one can imagine now how terrifying it can become.

Edited by: Maria Rigoutsou