When Nature Strikes Back

Unit07_When Nature Strikes Back                                               p.157

How Tilly Saved Her Family

A British schoolgirl Tilly Smith, 10, was on a beach in Thailand with her family. She felt something was wrong. She remembered the video she had seen in Mr. Kearney’s geography class at school. She had seen the video just two weeks before she came to Thailand on vacation.

The Smiths, from England, were celebrating Christmas at a beach in Phuket, southern Thailand. Deadly tsunami waves were already on their way to the beach.

“The beach was getting smaller and smaller,” said Penny Smith, Tilly’s mother. “I felt something strange, but I didn’t know what was coming up to the beach. Then Tilly came up to me and shouted, ‘I know what this is! I saw this on a video at school. There’s going to be a tsunami!’”

“The water was coming closer and closer,” said Penny Smith.

“Then it was as if the entire sea came onto the land. Tilly screamed, ‘Run!’”

The family ran to their hotel. The other people at the beach heard screaming and they started to run to higher places.

Unit07_When Nature Strikes Back                                               p.158

“There was trash everywhere,” Penny Smith said. “Even if you hadn’t drowned, you would have been hit by something.”

Tilly Smith is now back safely at school. Last week she told her geography class how the big waves came and how she escaped them.

“What I saw happening was exactly the same as the video that Mr. Kearney had shown us,” she said. “I saw the importance of immediate action when something strange happens. We can’t stop tsunamis, but we can learn when they are coming. Then we can save lives.”

How a Tsunami Works

① An earthquake makes the ocean floor move. This pushes water up.

② Small, fast, underwater waves begin traveling outward.

③ As the waves come close to land, they get taller but they slow down.

④ Billions of gallons of water come onto the beach and wash away anything in their path.

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Leave Nature Alone

Unit07_When Nature Strikes Back                                               p.159

Elizabeth Arnold, a conservation geographer, joined a team to examine the environmental changes caused by a very large tsunami.

Her team first explored the southern beaches of Sri Lanka, where many wild animals live. There was obvious damage to the coral. After two days of exploration, however, it became clear that most of the damage had occurred before the tsunami. Much of the coral was already dead from human activity — people and boats broke the coral before the tsunami hit.

Her team found that there was not much damage in “underdeveloped” areas, where there was less human activity. In these areas, the energy of the wall of water was blocked by “natural walls.”

Elizabeth says the lesson is obvious. “The government wants to spend billions of dollars to protect nature. But the tsunami and its effects are part of nature, and the lesson is LEAVE NATURE ALONE.”