As a panicked crowd of holidaymakers desperately ran through the back kitchen of a cafe on Thailand’s Koh Phi Phi resort, Luke Simon initially thought a gunman was on the loose.
Bracing himself as he stepped out into a labyrinth of streets, he even considered the idea that people were running from a rabid dog. He hadn’t yet caught sight of the 100ft wave racing towards him.
That early Boxing Day morning in 2004 had begun like any other day in paradise with a leisurely breakfast with his friends Ben Seyfried and Nick Thorne, girlfriend Sophie Moghadam, and brother Piers. They had planned to leave the island later that day to head to Koh Lanta. Instead, they heard the chilling two words: “Water, coming.” Sophie
Luke, then 30, who had been in Thailand for several months working as a PE teacher, looked back at the sea and saw 30ft palm trees had snapped in half, with debris flying at them at 30mph. “The horizon was sort of bubbling up and down because the wave had already hit the shore and then had destroyed anything in its path, and then was coming straight at us,” Luke, from Somerset, told the Mirror.
The now-50-year-old led his group to a row of streets he knew that had buildings they could climb and remembers shouting for them to “get high and off the ground.” He managed to hoist himself up onto a flimsy, corrugated iron shed and held a hand out for Sophie, with Piers helping to push her up. His friends had been pushed by the water to another alleyway, and as Luke’s focus narrowed on Sophie, whose head was covered by water, Piers was suddenly nowhere to be seen.
They had been hit by the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century, which killed an estimated 227,898 people, including Piers Simon, 33. With a magnitude of 9.1, one of the largest ever earthquakes triggered a tsunami with waves of up to 100 feet that devastated communities across 14 countries.
Despite several hours between the earthquake – with an epicentre in Indonesia at 7.58am – and the impact of the tsunami, there were no systems in the Indian Ocean to warn the population. Now countries have alarms and evacuation procedures in place.
On the 20th anniversary of the disaster, marked by a special ITV documentary Tsunami: The Wave That Shook The World, Luke tells of what it was like to survive such a tragic event, and how he came to learn of his brother’s death, five days later on New Year’s Eve.
After struggling to get his then-girlfriend to safety, Sophie was miraculously caught by one of the large cotton canopies that hung above the streets to provide shelter from the sun. Piers worked his way over to her along cables to ferry her across to the roof he was on, before using a plank to get to a higher rooftop.
Locals already up there formed a human chain to help her reach the top, and Ben was also able to join them. Sophie, who flew home two days later, had been just a second away from drowning, her GP later told her. Those down below, wedged underneath piles of debris, began to call for help, and Luke rescued some by tying a sarong around their bodies, using his height advantage to lift them out.
The group waited for another hour and a half as the powerful body of water destroyed anything in its path. The island then fell silent, and they began to call Piers’ name, to no reply.
Luke already began to form sentences in his head about what he would say at his older brother’s funeral. “I think my brain had already worked out the severity of what we just experienced,” the dad-of-two remembered.
“We were all together again but Piers isn’t, there is something not right here. I tried to stop myself putting together these sentences, but I couldn’t.” He then explored four scenarios, with only one of them positive.
“One, we would find Piers and he’d be fine. Scenario two, we’d find Piers injured; scenario three, we’d find Piers, and he’d be dead. And scenario four is that we’d never find him. So whilst the search for Piers lasted five days and we always had hope, I think intrinsically I knew that something wasn’t right.”
Despite the turmoil that had just taken hold, Luke couldn’t get over how the sun was still beaming down on them. “It was the most beautiful, tropical day. If you ever watch Twister, those sorts of films when you have these massive, colossal disasters, you expect it to be pouring rain and flooding and it wasn’t, it was just a beautiful, hot day,” he said. “And this volume of water came in, destroyed so much. And then within an hour, the water had really subsided down to about ankle length.
“When we got off the roof, I went into a bit of a leadership role, I think because I knew I had a job to do to find Piers”. He instructed Ben and Nick to get provisions such as water, while Sophie’s job was to constantly keep an eye on the sea as they walked their way to higher ground – a hill at the back of a bar Luke would visit.
They had no idea if it was going to strike again. Deep down, he had hoped he’d be reunited with Piers once at the top of the hill, but that moment never came.
He started to ask around to see if anyone had come across him, describing his key features and what he was wearing. But Luke was overcome by those who needed help, and he gave first aid to several injured and lacerated people who had cut themselves trying to make their way to the water’s surface.
Throughout the night, there were some false alarms, with people waking up screaming. “All of us started just climbing the trees because the ground had just done something that we’d never experienced before. And so it was just your instinct to get off the ground,” Luke said.
The following morning, the pals returned to the place where they last saw Piers. The alleyway they used as their getaway was clogged with debris, which he pulled apart to see if there was any trace of his brother, who he had invited to stay with him for Christmas. The cafe they evacuated had been stripped of everything.
By this point there was talk of an ‘earthquake under the sea’, and as dead bodies had been picked up overnight, Luke was only aware of the material destruction, ignorant to the the enormous scale of the human loss of life. He wanted the four of them to stick together as they searched for Piers, so they travelled to the city of Phuket, where they continued their search using the internet. He texted their parents, Celia and Henry, at home, saying, “Four of us are OK. We’ve lost Piers.”
“My dad said, ‘I wasn’t sure whether you meant Piers was missing or Piers was dead. What does lost mean?’ And then for that, really the next five days were all about strategy for trying to find a missing person,” Luke continued.
When they got off the ferry, dozens of locals were waiting on the other side, handing out polystyrene containers of food and offering lifts. In just 24 hours, the town hall had been filled with piles of clothing for survivors and there was a box of donated mobile phones to use.
Luke was overwhelmed by the generosity of the Thai people, and even those who had lost their own family members were doing anything they could to help find Piers. The group put up missing person posters using his photo, and they checked into the intensive care units at hospitals on the island to see if he had been admitted before moving to Krabi, where most bodies from Koh Phi Phi were taken.
A few days in, there was a false alarm: another 33-year-old man from Britain named Piers had checked out of a triage centre in Krabi. But their Piers was finally identified after they trawled through makeshift morgues in temples, where numbered bodies were lined up under plastic sheets.
“That was unpleasant,” Luke recalled. “Bodies decomposing at the extremities in 30-degree heat so their fingers and toes go black and they hiss as water seeps out of them. For around two days, I lifted up plastic sheeting and looked at bodies, trying to identify whether it was Piers. So, I mean, gosh, what a job. But then the Thai authorities had been quite smart, actually, and they photographed all of the bodies.”
Luke and his friend sat through a slideshow of the photographs, and when ‘body 348’ came up in a red Oakley T-shirt, he knew it was Piers. The body was found with his phone and passport in his pocket, which he had put there to get more money out.
“I told the police that I wanted to come and identify the body and they said, ‘No, you can’t. We’re not going to let you.’ And I said, ‘Well, why not?’ And they said, ‘Look, this doesn’t need to be the lasting memory and image that you have with your brother’.
“Ben did it for me and I could see where they were looking at him, his body was about three feet off the ground because he was just so bloated with water.” He rang home to deliver the sad news and worked with the embassy to repatriate his body.
“The embassy was really good to us and I said to them ‘I just have one last request – when we fly home, is there any chance I could be on the same flight with Piers? I’d like to do one last journey with him’, and we did,” Luke added.
The brothers were back on UK soil on January 2, and within two days, the family had opened a bank account to start raising money in Piers’ name. Luke doesn’t believe in survivors’ guilt and just thinks they were incredibly unlucky.
“Someone once said to me, ‘If you hadn’t taken that teaching job, he wouldn’t have come out and he’d still be alive’. And I thought, gosh, people are different – I’ve never looked at it like that because we were having a fantastic time, and I just think we were really unlucky with about a million other people that were impacted by it.
“I don’t feel any guilt. It could have happened anywhere in the world. And I’ve done enough research on disasters to know that they can happen at any point, at any time. And, we were just unfortunate.”
Luke, who was inseparable from his brother growing up, takes comfort in their memories from Christmas Day playing in volleyball competitions on the beach together and knowing that he died at a time of contentment in his life – which came just a few months after a period of struggle for Piers.
However Luke still doesn’t think the grief has quite hit him. Immediately after the tragedy, he was focused on trying to find him, and then his next job was raising money to give back to the local Thai people for their kindness and gratitude.
The 20th anniversary of the tragedy also marks 20 years since they set up School in a Bag – the charity which provides bright red rucksacks full of essential resources that enable poor, orphan, vulnerable and disaster-affected children worldwide. As the charity CEO headed back to Thailand for the filming of the new ITV documentary, Luke felt immense pride at how they have been instrumental in helping communities rebuild their schools and provide education.
He talks about Piers all the time, in his line of work, and shares stories with his daughters Evie, 13, and Iris, 10 about the uncle they sadly never got to meet. “One of the biggest things I miss and there would be no guarantee of this, obviously, but I suspect Piers would have married and had children,” Luke, who worked with his brother as a garden designer, began.
“And so, therefore, I miss being an uncle to his potential family. And then I hate the fact that my children don’t have an uncle because Piers is very present in our lives constantly. And so even Iris hears his name mentioned a lot, and they ask questions about him. And I just feel sorry that they’ll never get a chance to meet him.
“He was just a really good big brother. Throughout all of my childhood with him, I always looked up to him as a very good role model. I miss the conversation and the chat because we had a period in our lives where we lived together, we worked together, socialised together, wore the same clothes, listened to the same music, and liked the same films.
“I’ve had a few difficult times in the last few years or so, my divorce, I miss just being able to run things past him. Everyone loved him, and when he died, we saw a real outpouring of loss from so many people whose lives he had touched in some way.”
For the past 15 years, the Simon family has invited people to their farm on Boxing Day for a walk around a nearby National Trust property. For their charity Christmas campaign this year, they’re raising money for school bags in Sri Lanka, one of the countries affected by the tsunami.
“On the farm, we’ve dug up 20 little oak saplings and we’re encouraging people to buy them and plant them somewhere dear to them. Hopefully, they’ll send us the location, and we’ll create a map of these commemorative trees growing up around the country that are in memory of Piers, and all the other people who passed away 20 years ago.”
If you would like to donate to School in a Bag, please head to their website here.
*Tsunami: The Wave That Shook The World on ITV1 & ITVX, December 27th at 10pm.
