Joe O'Connor | December 23, 2014 | Last Updated: Dec 23 9:40 PM ET
More from Joe O'Connor | @oconnorwrites
TORONTO — Janet McKelvey was decompressing after Christmas at her family’s ski cabin north of Toronto on Dec. 26, 2004 when, like a lot of other Canadians, she heard reports of a killer tsunami that had washed over much of South Asia.
Indonesia, India, the Maldives, Somalia, Sri Lanka and Thailand were all hit. The horror of what happened, captured in the cellphone videos of eyewitnesses and broadcast on the evening news, was staggering.
It was holiday time, here in happy Canada and, half a world away — chaos — in the form of a great wall of water swallowing entire towns. It would destroy homes and lives and coastlines in a disaster that, once all the dead were counted, killed almost 250,000 people, while displacing close to two million.