BOXING DAY TSUNAMI - RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES

TWO DECADES AFTER DISASTER STRUCK, ALYCE SUGDEN RECALLS HER HARROWING ESCAPE

- Michael Crooks

O na family holiday in Phuket, Thailand, Sydney teen Alyce Sugden was hanging out with her family in their Holiday Inn Resort room on the Boxing Day morning of 2004 when she felt a rumble. Then, her bed began to shuffle sideways.

“I texted my friends back home saying, ‘I survived an earthquake!’” she tells WHO. “But it kind of spooked us, so we went downstairs.”

About an hour later, Alyce, who had just finished year 12, was by the pool with her dad, Tod, mum, Jackie, and 15-year-old brother, Philip, when she heard a commotion coming from beyond the wall that separated the resort from the beach.

“We couldn’t see anything,” she says. “But then locals started streaming through the hotel gate. Then somebody yelled out in broken English, ‘Run for your life!’”

It was all the warning the family had to escape the disaster, which many didn't.

On the early morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggered massive ocean waves that overwhelmed the coastal regions of 15 countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. More than 228,000 people were killed and millions were left homeless. Thousands of international tourists and expats, including 26 Australians, lost their lives.

“This has been one of the greatest natural disasters in modern history,” said the then prime minister, John Howard.

Looking back 20 years later, Alyce, who is now a mother-of-two and a worker’s compensation insurance consultant, puts her and her family’s survival down to just plain luck.