KOTA KUALA MUDA: For fireman Anwar Zaini Zakaria, the memory of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami is etched in both horror and survival.
His commute home from the Prai Fire and Rescue station that day became a race against time—a desperate journey to reach his wife and three children.
But by the time he arrived in Kampung Kepala Jalan, the unthinkable had already happened.
Despite his years of firefighting experience, nothing had prepared Anwar for the chaos he found in his village.
"People were frantically searching for missing family members and neighbours. I went straight to the fire department's command centre and was relieved to hear my children were safe. They were at a relative's house nearby."
But little did he know about the ordeal that his family had gone through.
The second tsunami wave, towering and merciless, had swept away their double-storey wooden house. The lower floor collapsed under the sheer force of the water, leaving the upper floor to drift like a makeshift raft.
Clinging to survival, Anwar's family huddled together on a mattress praying for their lives as the house floated violently through the raging waters, carrying them into a seemingly unknown fate.
Miraculously, their prayers were answered. The waves dumped the family in a bushy area several hundred metres from their home. His eldest son climbed onto the roof, while the rest of the family scrambled to safety.
"I was at work when my child called and said our house was flooding," Anwar recalled. "It had never flooded before. I told them to stay upstairs and wait it out, never imagining the house itself would be swept away."
The bigger second wave triggered by the massive Indian Ocean earthquake hit Anwar's village while he was attending a briefing to send rescuers to Batu Ferringhi.
He tried desperately to call his family but couldn't get through. With fear gripping his heart, he begged his superiors for permission to leave, embarking on a frantic drive back to his village.
By the time he reached a roadblock in Tikam Batu, about 10 kilometers from home, chaos had engulfed Kota Kuala Muda.
Houses were flattened, vehicles overturned, and survivors wandered aimlessly, searching for loved ones. But amidst the destruction came relief: a colleague informed him his family was alive, rescued by neighbors and taken to safety.
Later, his wife recounted their harrowing ordeal.
She told him that when the wave struck, the entire lower floor was ripped from the foundation but the upper floor was carried away and floated like a raft.
Their survival was a miracle, but the tragedy left its scars.
Anwar's wife's newborn niece survived unscathed, but her elder sister, Normah Ahmad, 60, wasn't as fortunate.
"Normah had come to our house with her grandchild after the first wave. She didn't survive the second. Her body was found several hundred meters from her home," Anwar said.
Now living in Taman Permatang Katong, a settlement built for tsunami survivors, Anwar looks back on that day with gratitude and grief. His family lost everything, but they survived, grateful for the small mercies in the face of such tragedy.