Tilly Smith, an eleven-year-old British schoolgirl, saved nearly a hundred foreign tourists on a Phuket beach in Thailand by warning them some  minutes before the arrival of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Tilly learned about tsunamis in a geography lesson two weeks before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami from her teacher Andrew Kearney. On the morning of Dec. 26, the Smith family was vacationing on the coast of Thailand and they went for a long walk on the beach. But Tilly noticed something was very different about the ocean that day. She recognized the symptoms of receding water from the shoreline and frothing bubbles on the surface of the sea and alerted her parents, who warned others on the beach and the staff at the hotel on Phuket where they were staying. The beach was evacuated before the tsunami reached shore, and was one of the few beaches on the island with no reported casualties.

The video “lessons save lives” on Tilly's story highlights the critical importance of basic education in preventing the tragic impacts of natural disasters.