Victoria Temple, a journalist at The Citizen in Gloucester, was caught up in the tsunami terror triggered by the Indian Ocean earthquake on Boxing Day.
The 15-metre tidal waves, caused by the aftershocks of a massive earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richterscale hit a number of coastal countries including the island of Sri Lanka, where Victoria and partner Andy Dunn were on holiday. Here, in an article which first appeared in The Citizen, Victoria describes how she survived…

“The sea is coming! The sea is coming!”Irak, the young man who managed our guest house, was banging on doors and shouting.

A moment before I had been lying beneath a fan and a mosquito net, reading and thinking that I really should get up and have breakfast.

It was about 9.15am, it was the last day of our holiday and I kept thinking how I should make the most of our day and go down to the beautiful beach. Our guest house was about 50 metres from the sea front of Mirissa, a tiny fishing village on the south coast of Sri Lanka with a beautiful sweep of golden sand lined with coconut palms, beach huts, and tiny restaurants.

I grabbed my dress, money belt and glasses and ran out the guest house.

Unfortunately in my haste didn’t think to put shoes on – which was something I was to regret sorely later.

Initially we stood around in a daze, then ran towards the beach – and stopped. The hotel which had stood on the sea front in front of ours had been completely demolished, crumbled walls, and rubble on the street.

Beside me were a dazed British family who a moment before had been having breakfast.

The boy, aged about 10 had a badly cut foot. His father’s legs were covered in cuts. Local people were running with ropes down to the sea, I guess to try and help people who might be trapped in the rubble. I didn’t want to walk any closer, because of bare feet and the broken glass and debris anywhere, but Andy walked further down the beach to see what was happening.

At this stage I think nobody really understood or could grasp what had happened.Then suddenly someone was shouting run, run, and everyone, tourists, Sri Lankan men, women and children and old people started running up a dirt track into the jungle.

A Sri Lankan boy was struggling to carry the boy with the cut foot, so I went to help and grabbed his legs and ran into the jungle bare foot with his foot bleeding onto my dress. His name was Pip and he was remarkably calm. He had been sitting on a beach front terrace eating breakfast when suddenly the water surged forward and smashed through the hotel.

They had lost everything.

We ran up the track, women and babies crying. Everyone thought there would be more waves.Then we stopped in the shady garden of a house near the top of the hill, I guess about 60 or 70-metres above sea level, surrounded by banana plants and jungle.There were perhaps 50 people in the garden and six tourists.

At this stage I started to panic. The last I had seen of Andy he had been walking the wrong way down the beach. My heart was beating so fast, and I kept asking everyone who had come up the hill if they had seen him. I was with a little girl, Amy, who didn’t know where her father was and was also worried.

For 15 minutes or so we all waited. When a Sri Lankan man appeared in the garden with a first aid kit and told us there had been three more waves, I started to really fear the worst.But a moment later Amy’s father appeared – he was fine, although badly cut and only had the shirt he was wearing.

He told me that there was another group of people gathered at a Buddhist temple further up the hill, so I ran through the jungle and found many families, tourists, Buddhists monks and Andy and our friend Leo.

I don’t think I have ever felt so grateful – but also faintly foolish for being so worried. We were the lucky ones. Andy was sitting next to a Dutch family with four little children, including a nine month old baby. They had lost everything, had had to grab their children and run from the beach in the middle of breakfast.Everyone had a story to tell.

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