Schoolgirl realised something awful was coming just before Boxing Day tsunami
On boxing day 2004, a massive tsunami with waves up to 30 m (100 ft) high devastated communities along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries in one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.
On one beach in Thailand, however, there were no casualties reported following the devastating natural disaster, all thanks to an 11-year-old British girl called Tilly who became known as “the Angel of the beach”.
Tilly Smith, from Oxshott in Surrey, was on holiday in Phuket, Thailand, with her family when she noticed that the sea was behaving in a strange way. Remembering a geography lesson two weeks earlier, about Tsunamis, Tilly tried to raise the alarm. "The water was really, really frothy," Smith said. "It wasn't calm and it wasn't going in and then out. It was just coming in and in and in,” she recalled.
At first her parents didn’t believe her warning of impending disaster. Eventually a frustrated Tilly told her mum, dad and seven-year-old sister, “I’m going to leave you.”
"I noticed that when we went down to the sea the sea was all frothy like on the top of a beer. It was bubbling. I was having visions from the Hawaiian videos that I had seen two weeks before,” she said.
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Tilly said: "Me and my mum were down on the beach away from the hotel. I was hysterical. I was screaming, I didn't want to leave my mum in case it would come. I said, 'Seriously, there is definitely going to be a tsunami' but we were walking further and further away from the hotel. I went, 'Right, I'm going to leave you, I know there is going to be a tsunami'. My mum was taking it in more," she told the BBC.
Eventually Tilly convinced her mum, who had helped her with her geography homework, and her dad alerted a security guard. Her father Colin told the guard: “'Look, you probably think I'm absolutely bonkers, but my daughter's completely convinced there's gonna be a tsunami." By coincidence, an English-speaking Japanese man was nearby and heard her mention the Japanese word "tsunami", bolstering her claim by saying: "Yeah, there's been an earthquake in Sumatra; I think your daughter's right,” Tilly recalled.
Tilly Smith (R), along her family during an interfaith memorial service in Thailand in December 2005 (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)The beach was evacuated to the second storey of a nearby hotel just moments before the 9-metre (30 ft) tsunami smashed into the beach, demolishing the surrounding area. People using the beach were able to get to safety - Tilly's mother, one of the last to seek refuge, said: "I ran, and then I thought I was going to die."
After the disaster Mai Khao Beach was one of the few beaches on the island with no reported fatalities, with only a few minor injuries recorded. "It was later when we sort of went through what happened we thought how lucky we were, 'cause if she hadn't told us, we would have just kept on walking," dad Colin said. "I'm convinced we would have died, absolutely convinced."
A spokesman from Tilly's school said it was proud of the 11-year-old and her teacher Andrew. He added: "He is very proud of the fact that Tilly was able to put in practice something that he had taught her."
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