Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004 - Photo coverage in Sri Lanka & Andaman
Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004
When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck on 26 December 2004, Belgian photo agency Reporters assigned Ezequiel Scagnetti to document the humanitarian response from inside the disaster zone. Within hours, he joined B-FAST, the Belgian Government's emergency relief operation, aboard a military transport aircraft carrying humanitarian aid. After a stop in Dubai to load additional emergency supplies, the flight continued to Colombo, Sri Lanka, where the assignment began.
Working alongside international rescue teams, the coverage quickly moved beyond Colombo. Military helicopters transported journalists and humanitarian personnel to Galle and Matara, two of the hardest-hit areas along Sri Lanka's southern coast. During those first days, repeated tsunami alerts forced rescue teams and journalists to leave the shoreline and move inland as continuing seismic activity kept alive the fear of new tsunami waves.
Every evening, photographs had to be transmitted to Belgium using a slow dial-up telephone connection. When a lightning strike destroyed Scagnetti's laptop during a tropical storm, the assignment nearly came to an end. Instead, he continued the coverage by borrowing computers wherever he could find them, allowing photographs to reach the agency despite the loss of his only workstation in the field.
Halfway through the assignment, Reporters redirected the coverage to India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located much closer to the northern extent of the earthquake rupture. Travelling via Chennai to Port Blair, Scagnetti joined a German journalist from Der Spiegel to continue documenting the humanitarian operation.
From that point onward, reaching the affected islands became part of the story itself. With commercial transport no longer operating, Scagnetti travelled aboard government vessels evacuating displaced families, flew on Indian military helicopters to remote islands including Little Andaman and Car Nicobar, and returned on military aircraft carrying refugees, humanitarian workers and emergency supplies. Every journey offered a direct view of the scale of the disaster and the immense logistical effort required to reach isolated communities.
Car Nicobar, one of the areas closest to the earthquake's rupture zone, had suffered catastrophic damage. The runway had fractured during the earthquake, forcing military aircraft to land and take off using only part of the airstrip while relief operations continued around the clock.
The assignment would become one of the most physically and emotionally demanding of Scagnetti's career. Tropical storms, continuing seismic activity, food poisoning and the logistical challenges of working across remote islands became part of everyday life. Despite these conditions, the assignment continued across Sri Lanka and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, documenting both the immediate aftermath of the disaster and the international humanitarian effort that followed.
The photographs presented here stand as a visual record of one of the defining humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century, preserving not only the devastation left by the tsunami, but also the resilience of the people who endured it and the international relief effort that helped them begin again..
