Try to survive, and don’t forget to breathe.

Say you're just out in the garden, or working the front desk of some apartment building. Then the sirens go off, and someone announces you've got five minutes before a wave hits. Five minutes. What do you do? You get up, immediately, and you climb. That's not me guessing, that's literally what emergency services tell you. If you've genuinely got a few minutes to spare, grab water, some food, a light source, and go. With just that, you can hold out two to five days on a rooftop, an apartment block if you're lucky, your own house if you're not. No roof available? Find a tree that looks like it means business and hang on.

Patience pays off... they say.

Easy to say, brutal to actually do. Once the water's moving, you're not saving anyone, including yourself if you're not careful. See someone getting dragged under? Awful as it sounds, you let it happen. It's every person for themselves now. Help only if you're completely certain it won't cost you your own life too, because a second body in the water doesn't help the first one.

💡Tip: grab a small first aid kit if you can. Debris in moving water will cut you up, and a wound you can't treat is its own emergency.

Preparing

If you're lucky, a warning gives you a couple of minutes before the wave actually arrives. Use every second. Get sturdy clothes on: long pants, a jacket, boots, anything that stands between your skin and whatever's about to be flying through that water.

💡Tip: keep something that floats within reach. A plank, an empty barrel, even a door works. It buys you minutes, sometimes hours, once you're actually in the water.

Myths that get people killed

Be ready before it happens

Live near the coast, or going on a beach holiday? Five minutes of preparation now saves the five minutes you won't have later.

• Check if your home, hotel or holiday spot is in a tsunami zone, and look out for the evacuation signs.
• Know your route to high ground on foot, and walk it once.
• Learn the natural warning signs: a strong or long earthquake, the sea suddenly pulling back, or a loud roar coming from the ocean.
• Travelling? Save the local emergency number of the country you're visiting in your phone.
• Agree on a meeting point with your family, somewhere high, in case you get separated.
• Turn on emergency alerts on your phone, and when travelling, find out how the local warning system works.

Real story: the girl who saved a beach

On December 26, 2004, ten-year-old Tilly Smith was on holiday with her family on Mai Khao beach in Phuket, Thailand. Just two weeks earlier, she'd had a geography lesson about tsunamis at school in England.

When she saw the sea start to bubble and pull back strangely, she recognized the signs and told her parents a tsunami was coming. Her parents warned the hotel staff, and the beach was cleared just before the wave hit. Around a hundred people on that beach survived because a ten-year-old paid attention in class.

💡Tip: teach your kids the warning signs too. Tilly's story proves that knowing them can save a whole beach.

Did you know?

The December 26, 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean started with a 9.1-magnitude earthquake. The waves that followed hit 30 meters high and moved at roughly 800 km/h, about the cruising speed of a passenger jet.
👉 It killed more than 230,000 people across 14 countries.