Me66

I'm a survivor of the 2004 tsunami and I was 16 at the time. I found it helped a lot to talk about what happened with my group, but I never talked with anyone who experienced a different tsunami.

If you'd like to hear about my experience read on.

Two nights earlier we had arrived the hotel, named after Kamala Beach. There was just 20-30 meters of sand between the hotel and the sea. We were a group of 16 aged 7-81, everyone spread across the hotel in different rooms. My room was with my two friends on the ground floor, which stood a few meters below seawater in a small hotel garden. The hotel was shaped like a huge E facing the water.

It was early morning around 8am I had gotten up and was dressed and ready for the day, but sat a minute to collect myself before going outside for breakfast. One of my friends was outside already and the other was in the bathroom washing up.

As I sat there I heard some commotion from outside, and looked out the glass doors, I saw a hotel employee run past my room in a panic, screaming her head off. I decided then that it was best to stay inside the room to keep safe. Maybe half a minute went by as I looked out trying to figure out what was going on, when my friend came running.

He came at a high speed, a plate of food in his hand, he said one thing to me which I'll never forget... "We gotta run!". I already knew something was going on and I was prepared to act, but nothing prepared me for what I saw next. I looked outside the room towards the hotel pool which was between our room and the sea, on a platform a couple of meters higher than us.

That pool was no longer a pool. It was the sea. Water started flowing over it and I heard glass shatter, glass which surrounded the pool and was the skylight for the basement. I ran back into the hotelroom and busted into the bathroom where my friend was standing with his head under the sink, without the slightest clue of what was going on around him.

I repeated the words my friend, his cousin had told me. "We gotta run" I added "now!". Normally he might have thought this was a joke, perhaps it was the tone of my voice that convinced him since he came right after me. The view which met us now was even more awesome than the one I saw a few seconds earlier. The basement must now have been filled up since water started flowing across the lawn towards us. All three of us ran across the lawn towards the stairs on the other side of the garden, wading through knee high water at the end. We quickly ran up multiple floors and by the time I had reached the second floor I looked over the railings and saw water and debry filling up my entire hotel room in a matter of seconds.

This was just the first wave. The second was twice as high and much more devestating.

Amy actually does this in the show.

The youngest kid was missing at the time so everyone else in our group was out looking for her. Fortunatly she was fine and was kept safe by another family which had scooped her up when the first wave hit, but her sister was still in the water when the second wave came.

Most people didn't have a clue about how tsunamis work back then and a lot of people were looking at wreckage, trying to salvage belongings or searching for family members. A lot of people were caught by surprise when the second wave came. It was fast, it was much more powerful and it was twice as high. It filled the second floor of the hotel to the brim and even damaged several rooms on the third floor.

Images of the 15 year old sister of the kid who was missing ran on CNN constantly so some of you might have seen her. Luckily she made it out with just a small scratch on her knee.

I don't know how many died during the second wave, but several were swept away. Luckily for us everyone in our group survived. One of my friends however paniced a while later from the rumours of an even bigger wave that was on the way. He left the hotel with a small group of strangers between two of the many minor waves that came after (by minor I mean about 1 meter high afterwaves which swept a few hundred meters inland).

My father and I evacuated an injured man to a nearby ambulance a while later and went looking for my friend. We didn't find him as we went the wrong way. On our way back we were met by everyone from the hotel after an employee had snapped and ran around screaming that the hotel was going to collapse. There was panic and confusion, but eventually everyone managed to climb up a jungle covered mountain nearby.

We stayed there until evening, camping out in a small rubber tree plantation and eventually went down to wait for some busses which evacuated us to the nearby inland city.

There are tons of small details and stories I left out here. A lot of people went through great lengths to help each other. A guy who had lost his house and everything he owned except his moped gave my father and I a ride looking for my friend, he refused to accept any sort of payment (so I stuffed a few hundred bat in his pocket without him noticing), a few locals from a nearby resort carried a man who had both his arms in full cast, up the mountain. People offered their food and drink. My parents gave away some of my sisters insulin to another family and got needles in return. When we were waiting for our evacuation bus a local family with a small restaurant cooked up every scrap of food they had and gave it out to everyone.

There was a lot of horror that day, but I have never before or after seen as much compassion and genuinely helpful people as I did then. It's during a crisis that you truly get to know a person, including yourself and that day everyone I was around was their best.

Almost 3 dollars per liter in Norway these days.

I don't know. This sounds like win or win-win to me.