Heed the Warning
StoryIllustrationIn the months following the devastating Asian tsunami of December 2004, an amazing story of survival emerged from Simuelue Island, the closest inhabited land to the epicenter of the earthquake. A news report said that only 7 of the remote Indonesian island’s 75,000 inhabitants died when 30-foot waves struck just half an hour after the quake. For decades, the people had heard stories told by their grandparents of giant waves that killed thousands on this same island in 1907. So when the ground shook and the sea retreated from the shore, the people recalled their grandparent’s warnings and fled to high ground.
David McCasland, Our Daily Bread.
The point
Remembering their grandparents' warnings from an earthquake nearly a century earlier, the people of a remote Indonesian island flee to high ground the moment the sea recedes before the 2004 tsunami, and nearly all of them survive.