Hero Girl Meets ClintonTilly Smith, the young
girl who recognized the signs of a tsunami from a geography lesson, met with Bill Clinton.
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, a community of about 5,000 just south of London. The children were shown a video from an earlier tsunami.
Tilly was armed with that knowledge when the Smith family decided to go for a morning walk on the idyllic 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 remembered. "The water was coming in, but it wasn't going out again. It was coming in, and then in, and then in, towards the hotel."
She recognized it as an indication that earthquake-driven waves were only minutes away.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.
Yes, I know what you're thinking.
