‘The sea was carrying huts, sunbeds and even vans’

A woman who was on holiday in Thailand when a tsunami hit 20 years ago says she would have died if she’d gone to reserve sunbeds as planned.

Karen Jones from Dinas Powys, Vale of Glamorgan, was in Phuket, and feared the worst when she heard panicked Japanese tourists shouting “tsunami”.

“It was my job to go down early that morning to get sunbeds, but I didn’t, and I’m really glad, because if I had gone down, I’d probably be dead,” she said.

It was 20 years ago that information began trickling through on 26 December about a tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

More than 230,000 people in 14 countries were killed, while many are still haunted by the memories of what happened on that day.

Karen described hearing screaming at 09:00 and seeing the sea move in closer, then go back out.

“When it returned, it was carrying huts, sunbeds and even vans,” she said.

At this point, her scared son Ashley asked her if he was going to die.

The family weren’t even supposed to be in Phuket – they initially travelled to Malaysia on holiday, but changed their plans after seeing the weather forecast.

Karen, who had always been a keen swimmer, is now cautious about going into the water after her experience on Karon Beach.

“It’s definitely affected my son, survivor’s guilt perhaps,” she said.

“We didn’t talk about it much and in retrospect we should have talked about it more.”

Shortly before 08:00 on 26 December 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck under the sea in northern Indonesia.

In the hours that followed, a massive tsunami fanned out across the Indian Ocean hitting Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia and the Maldives.

As the world marks the anniversary, people from Wales caught up in the immediate aftermath are remembering 2004.

“I was in bed when I suddenly heard my husband screaming that something was happening,” said paediatrician Sian Hughes.

Originally from Aberaeron, Ceredigion, she now lives in Melbourne, Australia, but was on holiday in Unawatuna, Sri Lanka at the time of the disaster.

Sian described the sound of water rushing towards them as being “like a freight train”.

“We were all sitting on the roof of our building and suddenly the water just stopped, there was complete silence just for about a second.

“Then it all started again.”

Sian’s medical background meant her skills were needed and she went “into work mode”.

Unlike some tourists who were left too traumatised to return, Sian and her family have gone back about 30 times and feel a “very deep connection with Sri Lanka”.

Sian said the tsunami changed the course of her family’s lives.

“We all became much more actively involved in charity and in helping other people, because it made us realise how much we’ve actually got.

“My youngest daughter, instead of going to do medicine, which she was accepted for, is now a full-time activist.”

Save the Children’s Gareth Owen from Welshpool, Powys, got a call on the day the tsunami hit and was on the first plane to Sri Lanka, where he led the emergency response for two months

“The real tragedy of it was there was at least 30,000 people killed because they were landless people who lived on the beaches in shanty towns,” he said.

Reuniting families and helping children recover was a priority, but so was restoring communities that had lost everything.

He immediately bought 100 tuk-tuk vehicles to help people get around and printed exam papers so children wouldn’t lose a year of education.

But what stood out was the “human connection on a global scale”.

“When the British public started to raise money it was an absolutely extraordinary experience, a once-in-a-lifetime outpouring of generosity and concern for distant communities,” he said.

In Cardiff, plans were being drawn up for a charity concert to raise funds.

Paul Sergeant, who was general manager of the Millennium Stadium, as it was then known, said he was thinking “can we actually do something to help? And when I say can we, that meant me.”

But the concert, which became the biggest charity fundraising event since Live Aid in 1985, nearly didn’t happen due to the difficulty of organising policing at such short notice.

Mr Sergeant described pleading with South Wales Police bosses to get the go-ahead and he and colleagues spent the next two hours calling as many artists, managers and agents as they could.

Contracts, which would normally take months to finalise, were exchanged by fax.

Although only five acts had been confirmed when the tickets went on sale the next day, 21,000 were bought within the first hour and the event sold out in three days.

Eric Clapton, Manic Street Preachers, Kelly Jones from Stereophonics, Keane and Snow Patrol were among the 20 acts who eventually performed on 22 January 2005.

The gig was attended by 66,000 people and televised on the BBC, raising £1,248,963 on the night for victims of the disaster, reaching £1.6m eventually.

Det Ch Insp Steve Thomas, who had been a trainee investigator for six months at Gwent Police, was handed the grim task of identifying bodies.

He was part of a team of 15 officers from the force who went to Thailand to take fingerprints from bodies at a temple in Phang Nga province.

“You almost go into a task mode because you’re there to do a job and our job was to help identify people unfortunately killed in a disaster,” he said.

It was a slow process because of the condition of the bodies and the team got through about two or three a day to start.

DCI Thomas spent a fortnight in Thailand before returning home but admits it took time to come to terms with what he had seen.

“It was pretty difficult,” he said.

“My wife was back in work and my daughter was back in school, probably about two or three days in, I sort of broke down.”

Since then, he has continued identifying disaster victims and has acted as a mentor to other officers, calling it “the most worthwhile thing I’ve done as a police officer”.

As for his role in the disaster, he added: “I’ll never know how many bodies were identified as a result of the work I did, but what I can say is we went out there and we did our best for the short time we were out there.”