What more can be said about the worst natural disaster of our lifetimes? The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, caused by an earthquake (the third-most powerful in history) off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, affected 14 countries around the Indian Ocean basin and killed more than 225,000 people. As an incomprehensibly massive event that occurred before smartphones were ubiquitous, the tsunami is very well documented and yet not: the mess of scrambled pictures has been picked over many times.
Tsunami: Race Against Time, a four-part documentary that flies by, reshapes the catastrophe into an anthology of gripping stories, capturing the carnage and stirring, moving tales of survival. The contemporary footage – walls of water silently approaching beaches, torrents raging through buildings, people hurt or dead in the aftermath – has been painstakingly resourced and expertly linked together, but it’s the testimonies of the survivors that stick.
Documentaries with such grave subject matter must choose how much narrative spin to put on the facts. How many storytelling tricks can be used before it feels distasteful? This series unashamedly uses a couple of devices to heighten our reactions. Survivors speak to camera, their presence in the safety of 2024 contrasting with grainy 2004 images of nightmarish chaos, which seem to be merely the nearest fit the producers could find to what is being described. But then the person talking suddenly appears in the old film, knitting the recollection and the clip together.
More riskily, Tsunami: Race Against Time repeatedly features survivors who describe losing contact with loved ones in the surging water. These memories are delivered via solo, tearful interviews, implying that their partner, sibling or parent died. Many turn out not to have made it, but on several occasions the fact that they survived is held back for as long as possible, before a surprise reveal. One episode even lingers on an old photograph, zooming in slowly in a way that usually signifies the person is dead. Then we smash-cut to the same woman seated happily in front of the camera in the present day.
Some viewers may find these liberties inappropriate. But they are an effective tool in evoking the horrible game of chance people were thrown into in 2004, replicating the way the lucky ones bounced between abject despair and relief. It is difficult to remain unmoved.
The interviewees not directly affected are well chosen, too. We hear from the seismologist Barry Hirshorn, who was stationed at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii when the disaster unfolded. At the time, the Indian Ocean had no equivalent facility; Hirshorn’s readings were the world’s best, but, like a supporting character in a disaster movie, he knew what was coming yet had no means of getting the word out. The digital age had not progressed to the point where someone in Hawaii could easily get the attention of a stranger in Phuket, so Hirshorn picked up a landline telephone and improvised. Although he eventually played a major part in issuing crucial warnings to eastern Africa, he is filled with sorrow for the lives he had no time to save.
Another sobering perspective is provided by Eli Flournoy, a CNN editor who was working the usually uneventful Christmas shift. Within hours, CNN had updates from multiple locations. Then their journalists deduced that the worst-hit place had to be Banda Aceh, Indonesia – because they had received no information from there at all.
The series’ producers have tracked down people who were involved in some of the day’s most extraordinary stories. One contributor was at Emerald Cave, on Ko Muk island in Thailand, a tourist hotspot with a beach accessed by swimming through the still waters of a cave tunnel. Her group was inside when the wave filled it. Another was on a train in Sri Lanka that flooded and tipped over, drowning more than 1,700 passengers. That this incident remains the worst railway disaster in history is mentioned, but in this context it is a footnote.
It is all extraordinarily harrowing – and the series gets as close to communicating the scale of the disaster as possible. But in the last episode, there is a feeling of humanity picking itself up and walking on determinedly.
It centres on the triaging and treating of hundreds of injured people on the Thai island of Koh Phi Phi amid complete devastation – a process led by a gregarious local restaurateur – who was so helpful and decisive that it was wrongly assumed she had some relevant training – and a British psychiatrist whose medical knowledge made him the nearest thing to an emergency-room physician. They are lucid, thoughtful, emotive speakers. It’s a privilege to see and hear them; that terrible day important to revisit.
• Tsunami: Race Against Time is on Disney+
