Original subtitles

This programme contains real life accounts from the day the wave hit

I woke up to this sound, a rattling sound.

The glass, the window of the bungalow was,

it was shaking.

I stepped outside,

and the silence...

..was...

I remember the silence.

No birds, no animals, nothing, apart from this...

..deep hum.

It was very eerie.

I could see through the trees

where there used to be the ocean.

It was gone.

There were people walking being completely gobsmacked.

They had no idea, where did the ocean go?

All of a sudden, I see my parents, and they are shouting,

"Joel, keep running up. Go up."

SHOUTING

They were shouting at me

because the entire ocean was coming back

with all of its mass.

Spinning everything in its wake...

SCREAMING

..crushing everything with its mass.

I remember there were some...

..some screams.

SCREAMING

I remember that very well.

So in 2004,

my ex-wife decided that she was going to take her two little girls

to the States to see her sister.

And my partner, Nickola, and I

decided that we would go away at the same time.

We did some research

and then decided that Khao Lak in Thailand would be the place for us.

When we arrived, it was just absolutely perfect.

It was blue sky, white sand and a turquoise sea.

And I just thought, this is...

..this is better than I actually expected.

Our bungalow was about 50m back from the seafront.

It was just a really peaceful place.

And we kind of laughed about it,

and we laughed about how lucky we were to be there.

My ex-husband, Simon, and I had decided very last minute

that I would join him on holiday for Christmas with the kids,

Lucy, Charlie and Georgia,

in Khao Lak.

It was going to be a fun beach holiday

somewhere we hadn't been to before.

And our rooms happened to be on the third level.

Simon was staying in one room with Charlie,

and I was in another room with Lucy and Georgia.

In 2004, I was 24 years old.

I was living in Bangladesh where I was teaching English

with the US Peace Corps,

and I really needed a vacation.

And I'd heard really good things about southern Thailand,

this little island called Ko Phi Phi in particular.

When I got down to Phi Phi,

I met some people really quickly,

a bunch of people from all over the world.

And we were just having the best time celebrating

that week leading into Christmas.

We got really tight.

We were calling each other "the family".

What nobody realised is that at 7:59,

there had been a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean.

The earthquake started on the Sunda Trench,

about 30km underneath the seafloor.

This is where we have two tectonic plates,

one is being pushed down underneath the other.

But these plates don't glide past each other nicely.

Instead, they get stuck.

Eventually that stress is then released very, very suddenly.

This created a tsunami,

which was now travelling across the Indian Ocean

at speeds of up to 850km/h.

I woke up in the late morning on December 26th

because we'd been celebrating out very late on Christmas.

I just kind of rolled out of bed.

I was just wearing a sarong that I'd been sleeping in.

And as we're sitting there,

there were some strange noises.

And there was some people that were shouting

and moving quickly.

And I thought, "That's kind of weird."

And I looked again,

they were just screaming

and kind of out of their minds with fear.

We were just putting sun cream on

and getting ready to go to go back down to the beach.

And we heard some screams from outside.

SHOUTING

They were quite distant initially,

and then the screams got louder and there were more,

I heard more people screaming, and I thought,

"There's something not right."

And there was a distant rumbling, a distant...

I would describe as like thunder

approaching, like an approaching storm, almost.

That's what it sounded like.

What struck me was that the thundering sound, the rumbling sound

was just getting louder and louder and having no idea of what it was.

I was thinking of maybe a storm, or a tornado, or I couldn't...

But I didn't know what it was.

And I saw this dark body...

..this just grey mass.

And at that point, all of us in the guest house

decided to stand up.

And we didn't know where people were going...

SHOUTING

..we decided to run with them.

VIDEO: Holy crap!

John and I had three children,

Robert, David and Kate.

They always love the beach.

The morning of Boxing Day,

while they were playing,

the water just receded into the sea.

John and Robert was very curious,

just went out to see.

And then I sensed something that wasn't quite right.

People start running.

SCREAMING

We heard the water coming.

It was like a, a thunder.

And I said to John and Robert...

.."We need to go."

And we started to run.

And then,

all of a sudden...

SCREAMING

..the water came behind my back.

David cried out and tried to grab me.

But I was dragged into the water.

The instinct was just to survive.

SHOUTING

A puddle appeared on the floor, a really,

really slow moving puddle from the back of the bungalow.

I remember looking at the floor

and looking at this puddle

and being just absolutely baffled,

and then the bungalow exploded.

I remember my feet leaving the tiled floor,

and then it was dark. Then I was underneath the water.

I wondered what the noise was,

and then I realised the noise was me screaming

under the water.

And that's the noise I'll never, ever forget.

I don't know how long I was under the water,

but I popped to the surface,

and I tried to call out Nick's name.

And I couldn't because I don't think had any air in my lungs.

And I managed to get a breath, and I called out again,

but I couldn't see her.

Every time I slid under...

..every time I slipped under,

it got a little bit easier to be under the water.

It just felt like I was falling asleep.

Then I thought of my girls, Sarah and Emma.

And I told them I loved them,

and I apologised for not going home

and seeing them after Christmas, and I said goodbye.

I then popped to the surface,

and to this day,

I think it was the thought of them

that got me to the surface that last time,

and I saw a tree.

The water took me straight to the top of that tree.

I looked over my shoulder at one point,

and I saw Nick, and she was, she was on the surface.

She was about 30m behind me.

The water was rushing back out.

I've no idea what speed it was going,

but it felt like being in a rapid, is what it felt like.

I've re-adjusted my hands

and looked over my shoulder again and she was gone.

Just, she was just nowhere to be seen.

The exact size and behaviour of a tsunami

can depend on lots of different things,

the topography, the depth of the sea,

and also the orientation of the coastline.

We ran towards this two storey building.

And on the second floor,

I could just see this wave coming in.

This kind of dark...

It almost looked like a forceful high tide flooding everything.

It was just this dark,

murky mass of water that just kept pouring in.

We managed to get up on the roof.

There were a lot of people who were in pain,

people who were bleeding, people who were screaming.

SHOUTING

There was just so much noise going on.

It was, it was chaotic.

There were a lot of people who were separated from their family members.

I saw Georgia and Lucy, and obviously I was, you know,

very happy that they were, we were together at least.

I didn't even have time at that point to stop

and think about where Simon and Charlie were.

It was just pandemonium and chaos.

There will be a point where

the tsunami reaches maximum inundation into the land.

And that's essentially when a tsunami runs out of energy

and can't go any further.

And at this point, the water stops going inland,

and, actually, it starts receding

and flowing back out towards the ocean.

We kept moving up,

eventually reaching the concrete area.

And from there, we could finally see the entire ocean.

And that was the moment when my father took his camera out.

I still remember this one man who was hanging on to,

I think it was a blue container or something like that,

a plastic container,

to make sure that it was not sucked under the water.

People struggling,

they were trying to swim.

They were fighting for their lives.

As it as it subsided, we trudged through this thick,

murky water...

..that had all sorts of broken glass and shards of metal

and other uncertain things in it.

It was really perilous to walk through.

VIDEO: Jeez.

We walked towards the beach.

And we didn't go more than a block

before we came across our first injured person,

and they had been lacerated in several places.

So we put this person on top of a door

and started carrying them up the hill,

out of the path of any potential future waves

that might be coming through.

I managed to pick myself up.

And then I was looking around for Robert,

David and Kate.

I was shouting, calling out their names.

But I didn't hear them.

As the water began to drop,

I opened my eyes and I was at the bottom of the tree.

I've realised quite quickly that my right leg

had struck a kind of bamboo spike that was sticking out

the bottom of the palm tree.

It's hitting my shin,

punctured the skin and gone up inside my right leg

by a couple of inches.

So it was kind of stuck, it was kind of impaled.

But I got up and started walking inland.

Although the water has receded,

the danger is far from over.

In a tsunami, there are often multiple waves.

And there are more heading towards the Thai coastline.

I return to the guest house

to try to get some things together,

try to get my glasses and some clothes.

I see that my room is totally destroyed.

VIDEO: Shit.

I'm just starting to get my bearings,

when suddenly I hear more screaming and yelling.

SHOUTING

And I look, and there's people running from another wave.

VIDEO: It's coming again. Yeah. It's coming again? Yeah.

It's coming again.

I didn't hesitate.

I just took off and ran away from that second wave.

On the roof,

after about an hour or so,

I wasn't starting to get worried or panic,

but I started to kind of think, well,

what has happened to Charlie and Simon?

And then,

Charlie came through the hatch into the roof.

It was just an incredible feeling of relief and disbelief.

My name is Charlie Stannard.

I vividly remember that morning,

my dad and I got up, and he just grabbed me and said,

"Hey, let's go get some food."

I think we were about halfway through the meal, and, um...

..just suddenly, everything sort of stopped,

and it was really strange.

Everything, everyone just stopped what they were doing.

I just remember focusing on the white line that was on the horizon.

And he grabbed my arm and pulled me,

I remember him just yanking me and running towards the staircase.

As we were going up those stairs,

I remember just suddenly being taken out by the water.

SCREAMING

I was separated from my dad at that point,

and he wasn't able to hold on to me.

I remember waking up in this room.

There was broken furniture and broken glass everywhere,

and the water was slowly rising and bringing me with it.

And then I saw my dad's arm pop underneath the door,

and he brought his head underneath the door

and just shouting, you know,

"Charlie, Charlie, Charlie," just shouting.

VIDEO: Charlie!

I remember just looking down at him and he had a gash on his head,

and you know, he'd lost his glasses,

and he obviously couldn't...clearly couldn't see me.

But I remember him looking up at me.

And he said to me, he shouted,

"Charlie, you're a very brave boy."

And in that moment that I made eye contact with him,

the second wave just slammed into us...

..and that was the last time I saw him.

I sat on a bench, and I think it was outside

a little chemist's called Doctor Chu Sykes,

I remember, and then I think someone gave me some water.

I pour some water over me,

and then I got put in the back of a minibus.

I said to the driver, we need to get up high.

We started to drive up towards the hills.

And there was a little 200-metre-long path he's driven down

and stopped the minibus.

As I sat there,

I kept looking down to the initial drop off point, if you, like,

or the rendezvous point where I had been dropped.

And my eyes were full of grit and sand and stuff,

but I could see well enough,

and I saw a pink top.

And then I said, "Nick,"

and she turned round and realised it was me.

And then we just hugged.

We just hugged.

When I saw Steve, it was just relief.

Just utter relief that he was OK and that he was alive.

I think we just cried.

We'd lost everything. All of our physical belongings.

We had nothing. We had absolutely nothing at all.

And that that didn't really matter.

None of that mattered because we'd found one another.

I remember, all of a sudden, I was under the water.

And then by chance,

there was another woman in the water very near me,

so we swam to one another.

And we introduced one another.

She was Sabine, and she was from Austria.

And then we found an empty fridge to hold on to.

I turned to my left and I was sure,

absolutely sure that I could see Steve

clinging to a tree.

So I started swimming frantically.

But the sea was pushing me back out,

and when I turned around Steve, I couldn't see Steve anymore,

and I didn't know where I was,

and I turned around and I could see Sabine,

and she told me to swim back to her.

So I swam back to her,

and we both held on to the fridge

and any debris that we could find,

and decided that we were going to swim inland.

After waiting several hours in the jungle,

eventually police officers came to us,

and they told us that,

"You are going to be sent to this local..."

it was called police box, kind of a police station,

"..and you'll be, you'll be accounted for."

Then we started to kind of descend

from this kind of mountainside level.

Once we entered the village...

..the death and the destruction was...

..it was overwhelming.

You know, we could see this village that was familiar to us,

but you couldn't recognise it anymore.

It was just mud, and wood, and concrete, and...

..and full of dead people.

In the early afternoon, we started walking down

towards the centre of the island.

It's close to where ferry boats would come

and pick up and drop people off.

About that time,

the first helicopter from the mainland came in.

And they took a handful of injured people on board

and promised that more helicopters would be coming back.

I was taken to one of the temples,

which I believe it was high up on the ground.

There were a lot of people there already,

a lot of people crying for help

and some of them look very badly injured.

There was one paramedic there,

and he tried to help everyone he could.

I was just hoping that John

and the children would come to that place as well.

It was a very hard night in that temple.

I heard,

it sounds like John calling me,

and so instead of looking around,

I looked up and I saw a bright star.

And I said to them, "Well, are you there already?"

So just wait for me. I'll find you tomorrow.

So please don't go there yet.

On the morning of the 27th,

at first light,

people often say that things look better in the cold light of day.

It didn't that morning.

I think we both, we just felt really numb.

We were worried that...

..we didn't know how we were going to get out of there.

But I was frightened for,

if anything, for Steve,

because I knew that he needed hospital treatment on that leg.

I was worried because of infection,

and I really wanted to get him to hospital.

Eventually, a doctor looked at my leg.

And there was a young French guy sitting next to me,

and I asked him if he was OK,

and he said, "No-one asked what happened."

And he was with his wife and their six-month-old daughter,

and...

..he told me that they'd seen the tsunami coming,

they were on the beach and they'd seen it coming, and they ran,

and they ran as far as they could

until the water caught up with them,

and they stopped by a tree.

And he put his arms around his wife,

and she was holding the baby.

And when the water hit them, the baby went under first.

The baby disappeared,

and he said his wife looked into his eyes,

shook her head and let go.

And this...

It's quite rare for me to be lost for words,

but I didn't know what to say to him.

Didn't know what to say.

I didn't feel I had a right to say to him anything.

We had one another.

Yeah, we had one another.

TANNOY: We have a helpline call centre. Helpline call centre.

193-199.

When I got to the hospital,

there was a board listing the name of the survivor.

So I looked at the names and there was one said David,

but they've got no surname.

So I went over to the reception.

Asked, "Was David a man or a boy?"

And, she said, "Oh, a man."

My hopes start fading away.

And then I said where they normally keep the bodies...

..and they said there was a temple nearby.

They put a lot of bodies there.

In the temple, I recognised him straight away.

I said, "David, mummy's here now."

Eventually we got put on a bus

and bussed down to Phuket airport.

We just sat on the bus in silence

because we felt so numb and in shock, and tired and exhausted.

We just couldn't speak.

And then we arrived at Phuket airport,

they dropped us off.

And I think we just sat on the floor and we cried.

Because we didn't know what else to do.

I think someone then came over and said,

if you go to this desk, they'll give you some boarding passes.

And then we got on the plane.

It was quite emotional leaving because...

..it was the last time we'd seen Simon,

so, we were leaving him behind.

We didn't know where he was.

We didn't know what happened to him.

And, you know,

I had to keep telling the kids that he would be fine, he'd be OK.

When we got back to the UK,

I was told that they had 24 hours to get the infection

in my leg under control or they would take the leg off.

And what was really odd about that was I didn't care.

I didn't care whether they took my leg off,

but I think I just shrugged, was like, "OK, whatever."

Because I was alive.

That that was, that was the thing,

I was alive.

Shall we look in the box?

Is that the watch you had on? Mm-hm.

I remember using afterwards. Yeah.

In the aftermath, try to work out what time of day

and night it was and stuff.

Oh, look, that's all cards, look.

To Nick and Steve, wishing you a full and speedy recovery.

Aw.

I think looking at these now,

the print's faded.

It makes it feel like a very long time ago. Yeah, it does.

It's 20 years old, but it doesn't feel like that.

For us, it could have only been yesterday,

the memories are that strong.

It's quite upsetting.

It's creating distance, I think.

It feels like it's creating...

You OK? Yeah. It's creating a distance that I don't want,

I don't want to be there, I don't want it to be.

I don't want it to be old. No.

Too many people didn't have the luck that we had,

too many people didn't make it.

And I don't want the memory of it,

any of that, any of those people to fade, really.

Certainly not fade as quickly as the writing on those cards. No.

That's what's got me with that.

I've become a very religious person through my experiences

in the tsunami.

In fact, I'm a deacon or a clergyman in the Catholic Church.

And I credit that...

..through that experience of suffering.

It sounds weird to say,

but I feel incredibly grateful that I was able to,

to be there to help people on that day.

That was a transformative experience for me.

It took a long time to be able to tell the children

that the likelihood was that Simon wasn't going to come home,

because we never found his body.

To this day, we've never found him.

He's one of a few hundred people who are still missing.

I didn't quite realise or accept that he was gone.

I was holding on to this belief that my father

was going to turn up, like he used to.

He used to go off on tours and, you know,

do security work, and he'd come back, and he'd always come back.

I don't think I'll ever get over it.

I suppose there's one part of me that will never will.

The only thing I do know is he's still with me,

and he always will be.

He was a good man, and a hero,

and you know he saved my life.

I wouldn't be here without him.

Around the end of January,

I was told that Robert's body was found.

I just...it was heartbreaking.

And then, on the 24th of February, 2005,

I was told from the embassy that John's body was found.

My heart is just breaking every time I think about that day.

We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I bought a restaurant in London in order

to keep myself busy,

because every time that I was on my own,

I can't help thinking of John and the children.

I just make each day go past with something to do,

rather than, you know,

sitting in front of their photos.

I don't know how long that I'll be living in this world,

but I'll make the most of it while I am still alive.

Not a day has passed when I don't think about

the people that didn't have that huge chunk of luck that we did

on Boxing Day 2004.

We now have a much better early warning system in place,

so that when a future event does happen,

that information should be communicated

to local communities much, much quicker

and much more effectively than it was in 2004.

Steve wanted to go back to Khao Lak.

He needed to see how he could help anyone there,

because the Thai people there lost everything,

you know, families, businesses.

So we started making a plan of how we could raise some money.

We raised about £10,000.

And on the first anniversary in December 2005,

we took the money back,

and we distributed it to all the projects

that we thought needed it most,

to give something back to the Thai people.

On the first-year anniversary, I got a tattoo on my back.

That's an outline of the island.

I did that as a memorial for all those people that died that day.

And it helps me...not to forget.

In May 2006, he got down on one knee

and I said, "What are you doing?"

And then he said, "Will you marry me?"

Obviously I said yes.

It just felt, if we could survive that,

we could survive anything.

We found Sabine, the Austrian woman that Nick was in the sea with,

and we invited her over to the UK.

And we got married in a castle in Scotland.

And we partied and we laughed,

and we danced and celebrated life.

Because that's what it is for.

That is what it's for.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media