Tsunami memories

“It was fate that we survived”

Eduard Issel was in Khao Lak with his wife in 2004 when the flood hit the vacation paradise. In 2019, the two visited the site of the disaster - and the "Tsunami Memorial House".(Bild: Krone KREATIV/zVg (2))

Eduard Issel was on vacation in Thailand, in Khao Lak, in 2004. Then, on the morning of December 26, the big flood suddenly hit. The Viennese entrepreneur's memories of the disaster, "which somehow made me a different person".

When the Viennese entrepreneur Eduard Issel (75) talks about the 2004 tsunami, he often uses the word fate. It was fate that he and his wife were staying in a different hotel to the friends with whom they had traveled to Thailand during their vacation in Khao Lak; fate that there was a reef in front of it; fate that he had recently seen a TV report about a devastating seaquake in Papua New Guinea "and I therefore suspected what was about to happen" when he saw the water disappearing in front of him on the morning of 26 December.

"The vacationers were walking around on the beach, collecting shells or sitting on their loungers, watching the strange events on the horizon, which they thought were a harmless natural spectacle. I shouted to them: 'Run away, quickly, something terrible is coming. But hardly anyone wanted to believe me."