Louisville resident Ned Berghausen was on Koh Phi Phi, a small island off Thailand, when it was hit by one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.
The day after Christmas 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake erupted underwater off the coast of Indonesia. The undersea earthquake triggered a tsunami with waves traveling about 528 miles per hour. In the first 20 minutes, the deadly tsunami struck Sumatra, one of the largest islands in Indonesia, killing 100,000 people.
An hour and a half later, the tsunami hit Koh Phi Phi.
Berghausen said he was vacationing there, a recent college graduate and Peace Corps volunteer who was taking a break from teaching English in Bangladesh.
“I arrived on this island and was immediately just stunned by the blue waters, the crystal clear waters, the white sand, the natural beauty,” Berghausen said. “It really seemed like a tropical paradise, and then it was full of just incredibly interesting, laidback people. A perfect place for a 20-something backpacker with a shoestring budget who wants to get away and hang out with some people on the beach and have some fun.”
Berghausen was staying at a guest house close to the beach when he heard other guests had felt “a little rumble” that morning. He was not prepared for what happened when he got out of the bed that day to meet his friends for breakfast
“I was still wearing my sleeping clothes, which consisted of a sarong and no shoes, my glasses weren't on. That was it,” he said.
He said he heard shouting coming from the street.
“People were screaming. People started running,” Berghausen said. “It was mostly Thai people, and I couldn't understand what they were saying. And at first for a minute or two, I just kind of let it roll. But then it continued and the group of us sitting at the table got up, and looked and saw lots of people, very upset, running and at the end of the street we could see this dark mass.”
Berghausen said he and his friends started running, eventually making it to the third floor of a bar.
“I'm seeing out of the corner of my eye palm trees starting to go down, and I'm hearing screaming, and I'm feeling lapping of water coming behind me,” he said. “This wave [was] coming in and flooding everything around us, filling up the land like a bathtub…but full of garbage, full of this gray, murky water, full of debris and just it kept coming.”
The massive wall of waves struck Koh Phi Phi twice, uprooting trees, flattening buildings and injuring about 500,000 people in a matter of hours.
Once the waves subsided, Berghausen said the water was thigh-high. He walked through it barefoot and found the guest house in ruins. Berghausen said he lost nearly all of his belongings.
“It was only after we went back to the guest house a second time and collected a few belongings, and started walking towards the beach that we got a true sense of the horror of this wave and the scale of the destruction of property and of human lives,” Berghausen said. “Very quickly we saw injured people — a lot of badly injured people — and people that had died from the wave as well.”
Lending a hand
Berghausen said he stayed on Koh Phi Phi to rescue as many people as he could. He found several tourists and locals who were hit by pieces of buildings, metal and other debris. Berghausen said he joined forces with a former Swedish Special Forces soldier named Eric Youngman, who taught Berghausen how to take care of the injured people that day.
“[Eric] knew things like, if you don't have a stretcher, you can use a door to carry a person on. He knew not to drink too much water when you're in a desperate situation, to drink it slowly and to conserve it,” Berghausen said.
Hundreds of people were separated from their loved ones during the tsunami, and some families never reconnected after the disaster. Berghausen said despite the uncertainty and danger, he and several others on the island stepped in to rescue others until emergency services could arrive.
“We had a hospital that consisted of mattresses that we dragged out of a hotel and laid out in a field next to a basketball court,” Berghausen said.
He said he teamed up with locals and tourists with drastically different professions to pull people out of rubble, reconnect families and tend to people’s injuries.
“It took leadership from untrained tourists and restaurateurs and scuba diving instructors, and whoever was on hand,” Berghausen said. “Even with injuries and being separated from loved ones and not sure if their loved ones had been swept away and they would never see them again. Those people jumped in to help.”
Reflecting on the tsunami
Berghausen spent the next nine months in Bangladesh completing his Peace Corps service before he returned to the United States. He said coming back to Louisville was an “abrupt shift.”
“There's not a lot of Americans that experienced the 2004 tsunami,” he said, “and for the last 20 years, I've felt very isolated from others that have been through this. It's been really difficult to try to explain what it was like to be on the ground during these horrible events, but then also to try to communicate the profound sense of heroism I saw in the days that followed from ordinary people that stepped in to rescue the injured and the dying.”
He said he dealt with PTSD for several years after the tsunami, and it led him to leaning into his Catholic faith. Now, Berghausen is a deacon and Catholic theology teacher at Assumption High School.
“I came to believe very strongly in God. It sounds strange to say that an experience of deep suffering could bring that about, but I felt the presence of God there in the rock and ruin of the tsunami. I felt that God was there with us amidst that suffering, and also there with us in the effort to rescue people,” Berghausen said.
As the 20th anniversary nears, Berghausen said those days on the island provided “a lesson in compassion and growth.”
“Just a few months after the tsunami, the United States experienced Hurricane Katrina, and we've continued to see more disasters at a higher scale. I think we need to engage with this question of how we respond to catastrophes, how we prepare for them, but also how we develop resilience, both physically, mentally and spiritually,” he said.
