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Cars. Fishing boats. Houses. Entire villages. The 2004 tsunami left Banda Aceh with mountains of debris up to 6km inland.
Some of it is still there - recycled into road materials, buildings and furniture.
Some of it was burned, creating new environmental hazards. And most of it was simply washed out to sea.
Ten years after that gigantic wave engulfed this city of 4 million on the day after Christmas, Banda Aceh has been almost totally restored.
The heaps of twisted metal, splintered wood and broken concrete have all disappeared except for some scattered reminders for tourists and local residents.

Still, authorities are concerned about the health and environmental risks posed by debris contaminated by oil, asbestos and medical waste sitting on the seafloor off the coast and in 32 unregulated dump sites around the city.
"Unsafe disposal of waste will cause further environmental damage in the long term," said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, who headed the Aceh and Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency, which led the massive clean-up effort and was dissolved in 2009 after the job was judged finished.
Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island, was the hardest-hit city in a disaster that hit hundreds of communities in more than a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean.
The tsunami left an estimated 10 million cubic metres of debris in Aceh, most of it washed into the ocean, Mangkusubroto said. If all that were squeezed into a 1-hectare field, it would create a tower of trash 1,000 metres tall.

At first, many survivors simply burned wood and other garbage. But authorities discouraged them from doing that because it polluted the air and could expose them to harmful toxins.
Some trash was covered with oil or chemicals, making it extremely flammable and hazardous, and in at least one case, a fire spread uncontrollably over a large area.
As key roads were cleared, trucks began carting tonnes of debris to landfills every day for at least a year. But some waste inevitably got dumped at random sites around the city. They still contain leaky oil drums and asbestos-laced housing materials.
Hazardous waste that was found among the rubble was buried in a separate marked area inside the city's landfill, said Tomi Soetjipto, the Indonesia spokesman for the UN Development Programme, which oversaw much of the clean-up.
Three months after the tsunami, the UNDP started a US$40.5 million recycling programme that employed 400,000 temporary workers to pluck wood and stone from the rubble and use the materials to rebuild roads and houses and to make furniture.
The recycled waste was used to reconstruct 100km of roads and manufacture 12,000 pieces of wooden furniture, Mangkusubroto said.
The UNDP's Tsunami Recovery Waste Management Project cleared about 1 million cubic metres of debris from the city, enough to fill 400 Olympic swimming pools.
Some 67,000 tonnes of other recyclable materials such as glass, plastic and cardboard were diverted from landfills and sold in local markets.
Indonesian authorities say the clean-up was possible only with the help of the international community.
"Finally, the mounting tsunami rubbish was cleared. For such a huge job like that, the world didn't leave us alone to face it," Mangkusubroto said.


Indonesia's Banda Aceh, 10 years on, is clear of tsunami debris, but environmental hazards may remain

The grounds of Banda Aceh's Baiturrahaman mosque were strewn with debris 10 years ago, but a massive international effort cleaned it up, with some trash used to build roads. Photos: AFP

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Mountains of debris left in Banda Aceh by 2004 disaster are now mostly just a bad memory, but some worry of further environmental damage


Indonesia's Banda Aceh, 10 years on, is clear of tsunami debris, but environmental hazards may remain

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Mountains of debris left in Banda Aceh by 2004 disaster are now mostly just a bad memory, but some worry of further environmental damage

Mountains of debris left in Banda Aceh by 2004 disaster are now mostly just a bad memory, but some worry of further environmental damage