Tsunami survivors arrive home
There were tears of joy at Dublin Airport today as some of the Irish tourists fleeing the devastated regions of South East Asia made it home.
Four families spoke of their relief after welcoming back their daughters - Louise McClean, Adele Curry, Jackie Dunne and Angela Gahan – who were on holiday on the Thai island of Phi Phi when the waves struck.
Louise, 26, told how the group of friends from Dublin stepped barefoot over bodies strewn across the sand to escape.
As the group arrived back in the airport they described their lucky escape.
“We are lucky because our bungalow was beside a cliff and that gave us the chance we needed to get up to higher ground.
“We were asleep and it was like there was a train going over the bungalow. We didn’t know what it was and we looked out the window and the Thai people were running up to the higher ground.
“By the time we got out of the bungalow we were surrounded by water and we just had to jump in. We were lucky then the water kind of receded and it gave us a chance to get up on to higher ground,” they told RTE radio.
The four friends said that when they hit the water they thought they would die.
The girls’ mothers told how they discovered the friends were missing after turning on the television on St Stephen’s morning.
“I just realised that was where they were staying, so I rang all the others up to see if they had heard anything or got any text messages or anything and they said no. As they had been texting us in the days previous,” one of the mothers said.
“That was when I realised that something could be wrong. We were nearly to the next morning before we found out that they were okay.
“Later on I thought they were really gone, they were dead.”
The girls, who are in their 20s, said that as they reached the hill they saw the injured and the many people who had lost friends or relatives.
They stayed up on the high ground for many hours but when they came back down “there were dead bodies but not as many, as thankfully, they cleared most of them away.
“It was horrendous enough.”
Adele said they were in their bare feet at the time. She said: “I have cuts and stuff on my feet they are only superficial cuts, I mean compared to anyone else they have really bad injuries.
“We have no complaints we are just happy to be back home with our families.”
The friends said: “There’s so many other people we don’t know if they made it or not. We are just trying to come to terms with what happened.”
Several others have flown into Dublin airport today and yesterday including Martin Hogan from Kimmage who fled from the resort of Phuket.
He said there was no warning as the tsunamis hit. The Dublin businessman said he met around five other Irish people, who were missing two of their friends.
Richard Jones, 23, from Kerry, who arrived back yesterday, said he was unsure if many of his friends that he met while travelling had reached their destination of Phuket before the waves struck.
