Repost: This is a good reminder that we can all learn to obtain knowledge and continue to learn. There is no age limit.
Nearly 700 people were injured and 214 missing due to the Indian Ocean earthquake that trigger the tsunami in 2004 in Phuket, Thailand.
A ten-year-old started screaming about a wave no one could see—and 100 people lived because her parents believed her.
December 26, 2004. Mai Khao Beach, Phuket, Thailand. Christmas holiday. Perfect weather. The Smith family walked along the sand on their first overseas vacation together.
Then Tilly noticed something wrong.
The water wasn’t behaving normally. “It wasn’t calm and it wasn’t going in and then out,” she later recalled. “It was just coming in and in and in.”
The sea had turned frothy—”like you get on a beer,” she said. “It was sort of sizzling.”
Any other ten-year-old might have thought it strange. Tilly knew exactly what it meant.
Two weeks earlier, her geography teacher Andrew Kearney had shown the class footage of the 1946 tsunami that devastated Hawaii. He taught them the warning signs: sea receding unusually far, frothy bubbling water, ocean behaving strangely.
Tilly was watching those exact warning signs unfold in front of her.
She started screaming at her parents. “There’s going to be a tsunami!”
They didn’t believe her. They couldn’t see any wave. The sky was clear. The beach was calm.
But Tilly wouldn’t stop. She became more insistent, more frantic.
“I’m going,” she finally said. “I’m definitely going. There is definitely going to be a tsunami.”
Her father Colin heard the urgency in her voice. He decided to trust his daughter.
By coincidence, a Japanese man nearby overheard Tilly use the word “tsunami.” He’d just heard news of an earthquake in Sumatra. “I think your daughter’s right,” he said.
Colin alerted hotel staff. They began evacuating immediately.
Tilly’s mother Penny was one of the last to leave. She had to sprint as the water began rushing in behind her. “I ran,” she recalled, “and then I thought I was going to die.”
They made it to the second floor with seconds to spare.
Then the wave hit. Thirty feet tall.
Everything on the beach—beds, palm trees, debris—was swept into the pool and beyond. “Even if you hadn’t drowned,” Penny later said, “you would have been hit by something.”
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 230,000 people across 14 countries. Entire beaches in Phuket were wiped out.
But at Mai Khao Beach, not a single person died.
Because a ten-year-old girl paid attention in geography class.
Tilly was hailed as the “Angel of the Beach.” She received awards, spoke at the United Nations, met Bill Clinton. Her story is now taught in schools worldwide.
Her father Colin still thinks about what could have happened. “If she hadn’t told us, we would have just kept on walking,” he said. “I’m convinced we would have died.”
Tilly still credits her teacher. “If it wasn’t for Mr. Kearney,” she told the UN, “I’d probably be dead and so would my family.”
Two weeks. One lesson. One hundred lives.
That’s the power of education.
NOTE: AI – In the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, approximately 250 to 279 people died in Phuket. While Phuket saw significant localized devastation, the neighboring mainland province of Phang Nga (particularly the tourist area of Khao Lak) was much harder hit, suffering over 4,000 fatalities.
We can’t have government shutting down Free Speech.
SECTION 1. The legislature finds that flags flown from vehicles being operated or moved on streets cause distractions and create unsafe driving conditions. The purpose of this Act is to discourage unsafe practices.
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We must protect Free Speech at all costs.
There are lots of distractions and unsafe driving conditions on the road – Loose dogs. Drunk driving. Driving in opposite directions. Tourist trolleys. Huge vehicles blocking our view planes. Sign Waving. Display of huge banners on buildings along roads.
The item that is most distracting is the POTHOLES!!
We’re forced to keep our eyes down on the road to avoid the potholes which are EVERYWHERE. Our tires blow out. Cars try to miss the potholes on busy streets. The underbelly of the vehicles are damaged.
POTHOLES are the most dangerous and most distracting.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent but our roads have become more and more dangerous. We would like the Hawaii Senate to focus on this huge distraction …. require a warranty on the road roadwork and so on to promote road safety. It’s ridiculous that every time it rains, more potholes appear. There is no reason why the state cannot expect basic workmanship for the hundreds of millions that are spent annually.
Please terminate SB 1357 – It’s treacherous to free speech and an open democracy.
“AQ” was not a personal friend. I wish she was. But someone told me a funny story about her. I remember her roaming the State Capitol in her senior years the few times I was there. The Honolulu Hale is my familiar space, not the State Capitol. That person said she would roam the halls of the Hawaii State Capitol. She was fearless. It came to a point where politicians would see her coming and evade her.
She was known to tell a politician in her or his face and asked, “What’s wrong with you?”.
We need more Ah Quons!
The following excerpt is copied for educational purposes:
In 1946, Hawaiian sugar plantation workers made 24 cents an hour. The five corporations that owned the islands also owned the houses, the hospitals, the water lines, and the grocery stores. They were known simply as the Big Five. If a worker complained about the heat, the twelve-hour shifts, or the cane dust coating their lungs, they were evicted. If they struck, they starved.
Ah Quon McElrath knew exactly how the math of poverty worked. She was born directly into it. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she grew up in the shadow of the Iwilei canneries and the massive sugar estates. Her father died when she was just a child. She watched her mother take in laundry, washing heavy work clothes by hand over a wooden board to keep the family from eviction. The territory in the decades before statehood was not the tourist paradise advertised in mainland magazines. It was an industrial fiefdom.
Five massive sugar agencies. Castle & Cooke. Alexander & Baldwin. C. Brewer. American Factors. Theo H. Davies. They controlled ninety percent of the economy. They dictated the price of land. They owned the shipping routes. They wrote the laws in the territorial legislature. They set the daily wages of the men who swung the machetes in the fields.
Ah Quon had managed to secure a university degree in sociology, but she remained rooted in the world of the laborers. She walked with a slight physical limp from a severe childhood burn, moving deliberately through the dirt roads of the camps, carrying notebooks filled with grocery prices, medical costs, and the true cost of living.
On September 1, 1946, the plantations went completely silent. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) called a territory-wide strike. Seventy-nine thousand workers and their dependents walked out of the fields. The cane stopped moving to the mills. The harvesting machines sat idle in the sun.
The Big Five responded exactly as expected. They locked the heavy wooden doors to the company-owned plantation stores. They cut off all lines of credit for rice and flour. They drafted eviction notices for the company-owned shacks. The plantation managers assumed the workers would return in a matter of days. A man might risk his own job, the corporate logic went, but he would not let his children go hungry. The isolation of the islands meant no outside help could arrive by train or truck. The workers were geographically trapped.
Records show the Big Five deliberately imported laborers from different countries over the decades—Japan, the Philippines, Portugal, Korea, China. The companies housed them in strictly segregated camps and paid them different wages based entirely on their ethnicity. At the time, the prevailing corporate strategy documented in management ledgers assumed that groups who could not speak the same language, worship in the same way, or eat the same food could never organize a unified strike. The division was not accidental. It was a highly calibrated structural mechanism of control.
The system the companies relied on was known formally as the perquisite system. Under this arrangement, housing, medical care, and fuel were not purchased by the workers with their own money. They were provided directly by the plantation as part of their compensation. It looked like benevolence on paper. In practice, it meant the company held absolute authority over a family’s daily survival.
When the strike began, the companies immediately weaponized the perquisites. Plantation doctors were instructed to turn away striking families. Water lines to the camps were threatened with shutoffs. The message was delivered without emotion or fanfare: the company owned the infrastructure of life, and the company was shutting it down.
During the second week of the strike, the eviction warnings appeared. Small, typed pieces of paper pinned to the wooden doors of the camp houses. The workers had no savings to rent apartments in Honolulu. They had no vehicles to leave the rural estates. There was literally nowhere else to go.
Ah Quon McElrath did not speak five languages. She spoke arithmetic. The ILWU named her its first social worker. Her job was not to stand on a soapbox and deliver speeches about the dignity of labor. Her job was to keep 79,000 people alive long enough to break the monopoly.
She started with rice. She calculated exactly how many calories a human body needed to survive without working in the fields. She organized massive hunting and fishing committees, sending men into the mountains for wild pigs and to the ocean for daily catch. She bypassed the company stores entirely, negotiating directly with independent farmers for vegetables that the Big Five did not control. One of the independent farmers who sold them cabbage asked to remain anonymous on the receipts. He still lost his land lease two years later.
When the plantation doctors locked their doors, she set up parallel dispensaries. She recruited sympathetic physicians from the city and gathered donated medical supplies. It was not glamorous work. She kept the union’s emergency medical fund in a battered cardboard box under her bed because she did not trust the local banks. The banks, like the shipping lines and the stores, belonged to the sugar companies.
Every morning, she updated her ledgers. She tracked which families had infants needing milk, which camps had pregnant women requiring care, and which locations were running low on staple grains. The strike stretched into October. Then November. The companies waited for the hunger to fracture the picket lines along the old ethnic boundaries. The hunger never came. The massive soup kitchens ran on her schedules, feeding Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, and Portuguese workers from the very same pots.
The companies divided them by language. She organized them by arithmetic.
On November 18, after 79 days of total paralysis, the Big Five broke. The strike ended. The workers secured a 19-cent-per-hour raise, a guaranteed 48-hour work week, and an absolute end to the perquisite system. The companies were forced to convert housing and medical care into cash wages. The mechanism of control was permanently dismantled.
Ah Quon McElrath spent the next fifty years auditing pension plans, enforcing safety regulations, and negotiating healthcare benefits for the laborers. She never sought fame. She kept her office in the union hall, surrounded by filing cabinets.
The sugar plantations are mostly gone now. The vast fields where the laborers walked out have been paved over for luxury resorts, residential subdivisions, and golf courses. The company stores are closed. The ledgers she filled with the exact price of rice and milk in the autumn of 1946 are boxed away in the University of Hawaii archives. The numbers on the pages are still perfectly legible.
Ah Quon McElrath: the woman who outcalculated an empire.
Source: Center for Labor Education and Research, University of Hawaii.
Verified via: The ILWU Archives, Densho Digital Repository.
