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Phuket Tsunami on December 26, 2004 – Phuket Spectacular Recovery


Memories of Phuket Tsunami


Here are a few photos I took when the tsunami hit Phuket on December 26, 2004, and the following weeks. So they won’t vanish from my memory. It’s not a dark memory, and it’s proof of the human capacity for survival and natural optimism, and this event shouldn’t be forgotten.

Tsunami day in Phuket 2004

I was living in Patong Beach then, and luckily we were not on the beach that day. The first sign was only a mild earthquake, so we didn’t worry. I was supposed to go photoshoot on that beach, but I was lazy and decided to go later.

When people started to run up the street in front of our house, we suddenly knew something was going on, but it’s hard to imagine the scale of what was happening. It started to get serious when we saw people with mud and blood on their bodies and faces shouting, water is coming; run to the hills!

We jumped in our car and reached high grounds. We stayed there for most of the day, looking down on Patong bay and the incredible scale of the receding waters. From up there, you could not see much damage. We knew it was extensive, but it only took its full dimension the next day when I walked the devastated streets of Patong. Nothing can prepare you for this.

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For several days Phuket was a devastated and traumatised island, and the priority was to recover the injured and the bodies. It is something no one should have to experience, and I won’t write about this part as it was the hardest. Like everyone on that day, I wish it never happened, but it did.

The recovery

Sooner than you would expect, people started to clean, mostly not knowing what to do with the scale of the devastation. It seemed that people wanted to do something to move on, anything. I remember digging in the sand for hours with a friend, trying to pull out some piece of garbage. I felt pretty useless, but we had to do something… anything. I told myself there must be something better we could do to help the island and its people.

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So, without really thinking about it, I started to document the island’s reconstruction and share it with the world during the following weeks. Fox News was showing the devastation; I was sharing the rebuilding. My photos contributed to the revival, and I want to believe they counted for something. It was the opposite of dark documentation. What I witnessed was unexpected; I saw how great the human spirit could be: In extreme situations, ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

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Living in Patong, I was in the middle of it, but thankfully just far enough from where the water stopped. And like everyone, we ran to the hills. Seen from up there, no one could apprehend the span of the event, and only in the following days we all started to assimilate the sheer size of the devastation. I’m not going to go through it, everyone knows, and millions of photos did prove it. News and reporters were always looking for the devastated areas to stand in front of, and everyone was mad at them for that. When I thought of it years after, we could say that maybe they did their part and unexpectedly moved the world.

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I chose another path: I walked through the ruins and the wrecks every day, and wherever I saw life coming back, I shared it on my photo blog. Comments of support flowed to such an extent that I was busy night and day posting each of them on my site. The more I posted, the more I received, until one day, a French TV crew knocked on my door and asked to follow me for a few days. I said yes, it’s hard to refuse such honour, but soon I realised that I didn’t like the idea of doing this. Nothing was wrong; they were nice guys. It was just ‘not me’. I never saw that documentary.

Phuket Tsunami
The first kids I saw going back to the sea… kids can adapt so easily.

So here are some of the images of the Phuket Tsunami that meant something to me. They might not all be striking or impressive, but each comes with a story, a memory and many emotions. Six years later, when I walked on the beach, local people still called me and greeted me like a “long-time-no-see” friend. It can be overwhelming.

Phuket Tsunami

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