Flood waves attacked the Sri Lankan shore fiercely, killing thousands of people, destroying houses, hospitals, and schools on land, and throwing fishing boats into the air to settle crushed above the roofs of collapsed houses. Giant ships moved like paper boats children play with, played with by giant waves and thrown in the end above the tops of felled coconut trees.
The Occurrence of the Disaster: The residents of the small poor fishing village overlooking the Indian Ocean didn’t feel the approach of the giant waves that surprised them, hitting the shore at a height exceeding ten meters. These waves called tsunami rush under the surface of deep water at a speed reaching the speed of a plane, without revealing themselves, then suddenly crash into the shore, rise high, and rush with terrifying force to drown and destroy everything.
Tsunami: They are waves born of an earthquake that occurred at the bottom of the ocean several kilometers from the shore. Earthquakes occur as a result of the collision of an earth plate with another plate called tectonic plates. The earth’s crust we live on, which extends under the surface of seas and oceans, consists of dry plates floating on the molten material.
This is what makes up the burning interior of the earth. Like coconut shells in a bowl of boiling water, the shells shake whenever the boiling increases, meaning whenever energy increases, and the plates collide with each other. Similarly, the tectonic plates that make up the dry land.
But when giant earth plates collide, their collision is terrifying, causing earthquakes. Sometimes one end of an earth plate slides under another plate under the ocean surface, and this sliding generates a huge push of water, producing super-fast waves that remain hidden in their rush until they crash into the shore, rising high, high, and forward with violence to drown and destroy. These are tsunami waves.
Death and Life: The residents of the fishing village didn’t notice the approach of the giant tsunami waves. Suddenly they saw these waves hitting the shore with violence, rising and advancing like a flood to destroy and drown everything—houses, trees, and humans. When the mighty wave subsided and the waters retreated.
The terrible tragedy appeared. Only a few people from the village survived—those who climbed above the roofs of houses far from the shore, while all houses near it were destroyed and everyone in them drowned. The survivors began descending to the shore searching for their relatives, hoping someone remained alive and needed rescue or help. It was amazing to everyone to see a dog searching for its owners in the wreckage of one of the houses!
The Dog Tammy: How did this dog survive drowning? Did the wave carry it high and then bring it down without harming it, or did it swim resisting drowning until the waves receded? The waves didn’t carry the dog and bring it down, and it didn’t need to swim to survive. This dog, and let’s call it Tammy, derived from the Sri Lankan Tamil name it lives with, like thousands of dogs that didn’t drown in the tsunami flood.
This dog attracted the attention of many in the world. Its sharp senses picked up the sound and smell of danger before it reached the shore with enough time to escape and survive. Before escaping, it howled and barked and pulled at its human owners’ clothes to get them to move away from the shore with it. But none of them responded to it. One even kicked it, annoyed, and others insulted it and shouted at it to get away!
The Secret of Survival: They didn’t realize its extraordinary sense of smell was picking up the scent of radon gas released from the depths of the earth when earthquakes occur, and that its hearing, which is 16 times greater than human hearing, was picking up the sound of waves approaching at terrifying speed hundreds of miles away. So it fled far, as far as possible, and as fast as possible from the threatened shore.