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'I NEARLY DIED IN THAT HUT'

Warning: This story contains content some readers may find distressing

"My hut filled with black, thundering water within milliseconds," says Ani Naqvi, recalling the moment her dream holiday in Sri Lanka turned into a nightmare.

Awoken by the sound of shouting from the beach outside, Ani was suddenly fighting for her life. Time felt like it was suspended.

Not long before, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake had struck off the west coast of North Sumatra, Indonesia, at 7.59am local time.

It triggered a tsunami that swept through the region and took the lives of around 230,000 people across 14 countries, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India badly hit.

Before the world of smartphones and social media, news began trickling back to the UK as families awoke on Boxing Day, with the full scale of the horror only becoming clear in the following days.

"I thought I was going to die in that hut," Ani says, remembering feeling completely disoriented. "I was underwater and upside down. It was so dark and black."

Ani, who was in her early 30s, was holidaying with friends on the southeast coast in the picturesque town of Arugam Bay, and says it was "pure chance" that she survived.

"The wave was so powerful it ripped off most of my clothes and jewellery," she recalls. The hut began to "disintegrate" with shards of light slicing into the room, as Ani was dragged further inland.

"There were dead bodies in the water next to me," she recalls. "I was going at such speed... I couldn't swim."

Fearing the worst, Ani "could see the jungle approaching" and knew that if she was knocked into something she could easily drown. Then she found herself trapped under a collapsing building. "That was the second time I thought I was going to die."

But moments later, she was able to surface and draw breath. Ani is acutely aware she cheated death that day.

In Sri Lanka, more than 35,000 people lost their lives.

"I was thrown into the path of a tree and held on for dear life," she says.

The second wave hit soon after Ani reached her friends, who barely recognised her due to her injuries. They joined the panicked crowds rushing to higher ground.

Later that day, Ani, who had previously worked as a journalist for the BBC, sprung into action. After a frantic call to her former news desk, she helped organise a rescue for the group she had gathered with.

At dawn, helicopters arrived. "The whole place was flattened for miles," Ani recalls, remembering the scene from the air.

Ani's experience would go on to shape how she spent the next 20 years of her life.

"When you saw the scale of it鈥� you couldn't believe you'd managed to survive."

'PALM TREES SNAPPED LIKE MATCHSTICKS'

Luke Simon was holidaying on the Phi Phi Islands in Thailand with his brother, Piers, and three friends when the tsunami hit. Luke was teaching at a school in the north and had headed south for the Christmas holidays.

The group were enjoying a relaxing morning in a cafe when people started running in, knocking over tables and chairs. At first, Luke feared it was a knife attack or a gunman in the street. They followed the crowd into a market, where petrified people were "running like ants".

"We could see the horizon in front of us," Luke, who was 30 at the time, recalls. "The head of the sea was coming straight towards us, snapping 40 and 50 foot palm trees like they were matchsticks."

Luke managed to climb on to a corrugated iron roof and tried to haul up his then girlfriend, Sophie. "I was trying to get her up but the building I was on shifted and pinned her against the wall," he says. "The water quickly came up to her body and went over her head."

Forced to let go of Sophie's hand, Luke stared in shock at the "boiling mass" in front of him. "I thought, what on earth's going on? This is crazy."

Sophie was dragged away but Luke saw her pull herself to safety. In the next few moments, it became clear that most of his group were okay, but his big brother, Piers, was still missing.

As the sound of splintering palm trees, crushing metal and screaming started to dissipate, Luke shouted for his brother. But there was no response. Instead, a deadly silence seemed to descend on the island.

A DESPERATE SEARCH

As the group scrambled down from the roof, Luke tried to ignore the dark thoughts flashing through his mind. "I couldn't stop piecing together what I would say at Piers' funeral," he recalls.

Scrambling up the side of a bank, they cut through trees into the undergrowth - all the while keeping an eye on the horizon.

It was only then Luke realised how badly injured those who'd been caught in the tsunami were. All around him were people with lacerated hands and bruised limbs. Others had suffered blows to the head. "I did a lot of first aid," he recalls.

The group spent the evening on the bank, struggling to sleep as the screams of survivors sparked panic that another wave was about to hit. People started climbing trees, desperate to get to safety.

At dawn, the sound of boats off the coast and helicopters mingled with the more familiar crowing of cockerels. Luke's first thought was to find his brother.

After searching the island, they headed back to Thailand's mainland, where Luke sent a text message to his parents to let them know his brother was missing.

In the days that followed, Thai authorities started picturing dead bodies, and numbering them. Luke put up missing posters of his brother and looked through images of the dead to see if they were wearing similar clothes to Piers.

"We got to body 348... and I knew straight away," he said. "Your brain tells you, it's intuitive, I said to everybody, 'that's Piers'."

That was at 12.26pm on 31 December 2004.

After identifying his brother's body, Luke had the heartbreaking task of breaking the news to his parents in a phone call he will never forget.

"I had to say we've found Piers and he's dead."

Soon after he flew back to Britain. It was only on the plane that the scale of what he'd experienced started to sink in.

WHY WAS THE 2004 DISASTER SO DEADLY?

By Tom Clarke, science and technology editor

The earthquake that triggered the worst natural disaster of the 21st century was like nothing geologists had seen before. It remains the third most powerful ever recorded, but the first to occur after a network of seismometers (instruments that measure ground vibrations) spanned the globe.

Vibrating a centimetre in each direction, the Earth rang like a bell shortly after 7.58am local time. While it was only minutes before seismologists pinpointed the quake's location, it was too late to warn most people of the impending disaster.

The magnitude of the shaking was one thing, the type - a megathrust earthquake that typically causes tsunamis - spelled catastrophe.

Tension had been building up for millennia in the Earth's crust along an ancient fault line where the Indian tectonic plate slides beneath the Eurasian plate.

When released on Boxing Day morning 2004, it caused a tear travelling at nearly 5,000mph that ran 780 miles along the sea floor 鈥� the longest such rupture ever recorded - spreading the earthquake's destructive power.

At points along the rupture, the sea floor was thrust upwards by 15m 鈥� instantly displacing a colossal volume of water, sending a wave up to 50m high towards the coasts of Indonesia, Thailand and the Andaman Islands.

Starting just a few hundred kilometres out to sea, the mega-tsunami made landfall in seconds in some places, and continued inland for up to three miles. Debris swept along made the impact more like a horizontal landslide, obliterating towns and villages.

There's only been one other tsunami of comparable size in recent history.

The Tohoku tsunami of 2011 in eastern Japan. Occurring even closer to land, large settlements and a nuclear power plant, this tsunami caused more economic damage than the Boxing Day disaster.

But in terms of lives lost, over thousands of miles of coastline, nothing compares to the 2004 event.

LESSONS LEARNT

"If a tsunami happened today, we would not see that number of deaths or injuries," says Dr Mahesh Gunasekara, director general of the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society.

On the day the tsunami hit, Dr Gunasekara was visiting family when his phone rang, and he was told there had been a "massive disaster".

He sped back to Kanthale hospital in northeast Sri Lanka, where he worked at the time. Nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to witness. "The hospital corridors were full of dead bodies," he recalls.

Many of those who survived had suffered horrific injuries - some requiring up to 400 stitches.

"Nobody in the country was prepared to handle such a disaster," he says. In the past two decades, the Red Cross has refined its response to natural disasters.

"We did not have a proper disaster management system [before the tsunami]," he says. "Now we do."

The focus now is on preparedness, he says, pointing to emergency warning systems, education, stockpiling supplies as well as "empowering and equipping" local leaders.

"The culture has changed," Dr Gunasekara says.

David Peppiatt, director of humanitarian cash assistance at the British Red Cross, says after the 2004 tsunami "the international aid community shifted how it worked to have a greater focus on disaster reduction".

"There are so many important learnings from the tsunami that have impacted the way we respond to disasters in the last 20 years," he says - with programmes rolled out in all impacted countries.

'SURVIVORS' GUILT'

Ani struggled at first after her near-death experience but has tried to find the positives.

"We need to make our lives mean something because we survived where so many others died," she says.

Having also dealt with a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, Ani is now a life coach. She wants to show people that "whatever your personal tsunamis are, you can overcome them".

A few months after the disaster, Luke set up a charity in his brother's name, the Piers Simon Appeal.

It has since transformed into School in a Bag, which distributes educational supplies to children across the globe. Since its inception, it has delivered more than 150,000 bags across 58 countries.

"My biggest sadness is that I have two daughters now," says Luke, "and they don't have an uncle or cousins. But we have to just deal with it."

At first, Luke wasn't sure how to mark the anniversary of the tsunami, but a few years after his brother's death he organised a walk locally in Somerset. It now takes place every year with usually 50-60 people in attendance, and sometimes as many as 100, which he says is good as it "gets people out of the house".

"People love it... We've been lucky that we've been able to celebrate Piers," he says.

Anyone feeling emotionally distressed can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email [email protected] in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK