Back Home And Safe, Australians Relive The Hell

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday December 28, 2004

Justin Norrie

The first Australians returned home last night from sites devastated by tidal waves and told of running in terror as surging water swept bodies to sea.

Rima Haynes, 18, of Burwood, was holidaying at the Park Royal Hotel in Penang with her mother and three siblings.

"I was two metres from shore," she said at Sydney Airport. "Everyone could see the waves coming and coming but didn't think anything would happen. But now I'm lucky to be alive. The waves started smashing into the shore. I turned and sprinted for my life, screaming. I grabbed my little brother, Ibrahim; he's seven and can't swim so he would have died."

Their mother, Hunni Haynes, scooped up another son, 13-year-old Mark, and fled inland as the water rose to their knees. "We didn't look back to see if anyone was dead," she said. "If we did, we might not have made it ourselves."

Rima said: "The hotel manager told us to take a different route to the airport because there were too many dead bodies the normal way."

On the west coast of Sri Lanka, Justine Quinn saw five people swept out to sea at Negombo. "We saw the water level rising very quickly," the 30-year-old from North Sydney said. "We all turned and ran."

Helen Bone and her husband, Brenton Andriske, from Adelaide, were woken by a "hurricane-like sound" just before three waves pounded the shore of Kata Beach at Phuket. Ms Bone said people fled screaming when the first wave hit, then returned minutes later thinking they were safe. "Then the second and third waves came in and there was chaos, screaming. I can't describe it - it was horrible, surreal. There was a guy that jumped off a long boat as he tried to bring it in to shore and a wave came and sucked him out and we never saw him again."