UNITED NATIONS – Tilly Smith, just 10 years old at the time, put her geography lessons to good use. By quickly recognizing the warning signs of a tsunami, the English schoolgirl saved about 100 people from almost certain death at a Thai resort.
On Thursday, Tilly, now 11, visited the United Nations and met former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. envoy for the tsunami recovery effort.
“My mum didn’t realize what was happening on the beach because she wasn’t taught about tsunamis when she was younger,” said Tilly, who was in New York with her mother, father and sister. The Smith family all escaped the lethal waves after Tilly’s early warning during their vacation on the island of Phuket.
Two weeks before the Dec. 26, 2004, disaster that took at least 178,000 lives, Tilly had studied tsunamis in her geography class in Oxshott, just south of London.
She was armed with that knowledge when the Smith family decided to go for a walk on the beach near the JW Marriott Phuket Resort and Spa.
Suddenly, “I saw this bubbling on the water, right on the edge, and foam sizzling just like in a frying pan,” she recalled. “The water was coming in, but it wasn’t going out again. It was coming in, and then in, and then in, toward the hotel.”
She recognized it as an indication that earthquake-driven waves were only minutes away.
Tilly turned to her mother, Penny, and said, “Mum, I know there’s something wrong, I know it’s going to happen – the tsunami.” When her mother replied that it was just a day at the beach, “Tilly went hysterical,” recalls her father, Colin, who decided to return to the hotel with her 8-year-old sister, Holly.
While Colin Smith relayed Tilly’s warning to the hotel staff, the girl dashed back toward the beach filled with about 100 people. She told the Japanese-born hotel chef of the danger, “and he knew the word tsunami because it’s Japanese. But he never saw one.”
The chef and a nearby hotel security agent both spread the warning, and the beach was swiftly evacuated minutes before the devastating waves struck.
The beach near the Marriott Hotel was one of the few in Phuket where no one was killed or seriously hurt.
Associated Press
Tilly Smith, 11, of Oxshott, England, talks with former President Clinton, who is serving as the U.N. special envoy for tsunami recovery, on Thursday in New York.
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