Against All Odds: Tsunami Survivor Shares How God ‘Miraculously’ Saved Entire Family
By Movieguide® Contributor
Riley Kehoe and her family’s survival of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was nothing short of a miracle.
“When I was 10 years old, my family traveled to Thailand…,” she shared recently on the “Jesus Calling” podcast. “We spent a few weeks there working at an orphanage that rescued children from the sex trade, and after that, my whole extended family had booked a vacation.”
“We had booked beachfront bungalows, and when we got there, they had mixed up our bookings and given us a concrete apartment on the top floor in the middle of the island,” she recalled.
The day after Christmas, Kehoe woke up to the building shaking.
“I’m like, ‘Mom, what’s going on?’ My mom looks at me, and she’s like, ‘It’s an earthquake, honey, don’t worry.’ The moment she says that, the earthquake stopped.”
“My parents called the front desk to ask, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ and they told us it was just this random one-off earthquake,” she said.
While playing on the beach with her sisters, Kehoe heard everything go silent. Birds, monkeys and dogs were fleeing. After the silence came people’s screams. “It’s just the sound of horror,” Kehoe said.
“My mom grabs my one sister and my dad grabs the other sister, and she’s like, ‘We have to run.’ We ran to the other side of the island, which took about a minute, and there I saw a sight that I’ll never forget.”
She saw a man on a boat attempting to get off before a huge wave hit. He realized he wasn’t going to make it, so he turned back.
“There the thin white line, which is now a 50 foot tsunami, comes and smashes him. He and his boat fly into a thousand pieces. It was this moment where I knew I might not survive,” she said.
Her mom rushed her and her sisters to a goat’s path up a hill.
“I looked behind me, and I saw sights that no one should ever see. I saw the wave just take life after life after life,” Kehoe recalled.
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“I had this moment where fear just wanted me to freeze. My dad saw me frozen, and he said ‘Riley, run.’ I focused on the voice of my father, and I started running as fast as I could. “
The family got just high enough that the tsunami didn’t reach them — one car’s distance away from the waves.
After six hours on the hill, they made their way back to their apartment, passing by bodies and not knowing if any of their family was alive.
When they got there, “There amongst the few hundred survivors that had gathered together was every single member of my family — all my family members had miraculously survived,” while 230,000 died.
The family stayed for another week as her parents helped people on the island.
“We had limited food and water, and we lived off a handful of rice. They were out there moving bodies, moving debris, moving bricks…They were showing us that this is the moment where we can have the courage to care for others,” she said.
Kehoe is an influencer and speaker who shares about her experiences and mission work on social media. She also wrote about her tsunami experience in her book, Three Seconds of Courage.
Kehoe wants everyone to know that no matter what trauma they’ve experienced, “there is light and that Jesus will redeem, and He will be with you in your pain and your suffering… He will never abandon you.”
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