From Fear to Survival: Knowledge Is Key

In December 2004, Tilly Smith, a 10-year-old English schoolgirl, was vacationing on the coast of Thailand with her parents and her younger sister Holly."The water was really, really frothy. It wasn't calm and it wasn't going in and then out," she said. "It was just coming in and in and in."

She remembered that everything she was seeing reminded her of a lesson on tsunamis she'd had at school just a few weeks before.

The giant tsunami killed a quarter-million people around the world that day, 10,000 of them in Thailand. There were several injuries at the Smith's hotel, but not a single fatality, a miracle British tabloids credited to Tilly, whom they dubbed the "Angel of the Beach."

"This is a story that gives us a lot of hope," she said, "because if a 10-year-old girl can save people from a tsunami with basic information, then certainly we are all capable of that."    read the whole ABC News Story