At 27, Andrew Chaggar was on the trip of a lifetime, traveling through Asia with his girlfriend, Nova. But on December 26, 2004, everything changed.
The couple was sleeping in a beachfront bungalow in Khao Lak, Thailand, just 100 feet from the ocean, when Chaggar woke to a thunderous roar, which he compared to “a jet engine building up for take-off.” Nova was standing beside the bed, frightened.
Seconds later, the first tsunami wave hit.
The bungalows fell “like dominoes,” Chaggar recalled in a recent LADbible Stories interview. He remembers being inside one moment, then suddenly in the water, surrounded by splintered buildings and debris. It felt like a “washing machine full of nails.”
“We heard this incredible roar,” Chaggar recalled in a harrowing interview detailing the disaster. Within seconds, a massive wall of black water smashed through their accommodation. “The door just imploded inward, and the walls literally disintegrated around us,” he said. Chaggar was swept into a violent churn of debris, battling for breath while being slammed against submerged wreckage: “You’re tossed around like a rag doll in a washing machine. You have zero control. I genuinely thought, ‘This is it, I’m dying today.’”
Related: Watch Rare Tsunami Swallow Brazil Beach in 20 Seconds (Video)
An oil drum struck his head, knocking him underwater again. The current swept him into a hotel construction site, where wreckage pinned his leg against a concrete pillar. The injury was severe, but Chaggar believes the pillar kept him from being dragged into the bay.
See below for a documentary showing on-the-ground raw footage of the tsunami:
A second wave rose to within inches of his position. Chaggar survived that, too, and waited roughly four hours before two strangers helped him reach safety.
But Nova was missing.
Chaggar was hospitalized amid scenes of devastation. For months, he waited for news of his girlfriend. Around six months later, authorities requested a meeting.
“I had a fair idea of what it was going to be about,” he recalled.
Investigators had found “a partial dental match” and a photograph of a necklace Chaggar recognized as Nova’s. She had died in the tsunami.
The disaster began with a magnitude-9.1 earthquake off Sumatra, Indonesia. According to NOAA, the resulting waves killed or left missing nearly 228,000 people across the Indian Ocean region, including more than 8,000 in Thailand. Approximately 1.7 million people were displaced.
Chaggar later returned to Thailand to help rebuild and founded a disaster-relief charity. Now married with two children, he remains close to Nova’s parents. His children call them Grandma and Granddad.
“That, to me, is just amazing,” he said.
Related: Watch: Japan’s Underwater ‘Mount Everest’ Unleashed a 124-Foot Tsunami
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