A British man has recalled fears the world was ending as the Boxing Day tsunami devastated his home in Thailand 20 years ago.
John Metcalfe had only been living there for two-and-a-half years. The Boxing Day Tsunami, 20 years ago today, killed 227,898 people across 14 Asian countries.
The dad-of-two was working as a scuba diving instructor on the island of Kho Phi Phi in Thailand. He had been living in the country for two and a half years when the worst natural catastrophe in living memory hit and changed his life forever.
After spending Christmas day with friend, John had slept in on Boxing Day, never dreaming what was about to befall him and everyone around him. John said he had met a woman the night before and she had stayed the night. As he emerged from the bathroom where he had just had a shower he saw her sitting in his bedsit and then noticed the sunlight disappear from the window. That was the last time he would ever see her.
Little did he know at the time that an earthquake had occurred under the Indian Ocean hundreds of miles away, which had caused 100ft waves to race inland where they destroyed coastal communities, smashing down trees and large buildings and sweeping people and animals away as the rubble from destroyed towns and villages because lethal debris that crushed people beneath an avalanche of mud, metal and concrete.
Speaking to the ECHO at his home in Huyton, John, now 44, said: “I looked out the window and the light coming through was black. That was the wave coming over the building. The next minute, the building collapsed on top of me and the water came in. I was trapped under the rubble and being bashed about in pitch black water.
“I thought I was going to die. I swam towards the light that was on the surface of the water. There were people around me screaming, while getting dragged out to sea. I saw a palm tree coming in my direction, so I thought ‘I’ll cling onto the palm tree to avoid getting dragged [further] into the sea’. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do or it was the wrong thing, I’m not sure but I clung onto it and that’s when all the debris in the water came into the back of me.”
John suffered traumatic injuries to his thigh as he was pinned against a tree. Despite the crippling injury, John recalled: “I didn’t feel it at the time. I felt like I was getting crushed. Somehow, I washed up outside my mate’s apartment. It was on stilts and was the only one still standing. He came out and I shouted to him ‘get down and pull the debris off the back of me’.”
But before John could process what had happened, a second wave arrived and threw him and his friend Ben into the side of a building before being taken out to sea as the wave receded. John said: “At this point, I’m losing blood and it’s really hot. We got dragged out [to sea] but I saw this big blue flotation device. I’m struggling swimming and half my leg was hanging off. I’ve got big lacerations on my stomachs and my arms.
“I get on this big blue drum and it drifts behind his apartment again so we manage to get onto the roof, he climbs up and I’m like a dead weight but with the last bit of energy I shimmy my way onto it and just lay there. I was thinking if a third wave comes, that’s me, I’m done.
“A third one didn’t come luckily enough and [Ben] went and got help from some of our friends to help me get up to higher ground. We didn’t know what was going on, I’d never even heard of a tsunami till after that and now I know what one is. It was just a fight for your life.”
John and his friends had survived the initial danger but they still had to get to high ground where they could be safer and get medical help. John told the ECHO how the group used a door as a stretcher to carry him in a race against time to ensure he didn’t bleed out, having suffered catastrophic injuries to his leg and stomach.
In photos he showed to the ECHO, which are too graphic to be shared here, John’s upper left leg can be seen to be cut to the bone. John was airlifted to the mainland by a helicopter where he could be stabilised. Regarding the freak wave that had almost killed him and had killed many around him, John said: “I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was the end of the world. I wasn’t sure. And then I heard it was a tsunami – an earthquake in the ocean.”
At 7.59am local time an earthquake at a magnitude of 9.1, occurred off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. In the seven hours that followed, a tsunami wave spread across the ocean and devastated areas as far away as East Africa. One of the largest natural disasters in recorded history, it killed more than 200,000 people across 15 countries.
John said he never saw the person who spent the night again, and presumes she was killed in the disaster. John’s dad, Dave, was working on a ship in the Persian Gulf as an assistant dive supervisor at the time that news of the tsunami began to come in. Speaking to the ECHO in his North Wales pub the Holly Bush Inn, Dave explained how he heard there were deaths in Thailand on Boxing Day morning and rang his son but there was no answer.
Dave, now 65, said: “I heard about [the tsunami] as we were coming into port in a DSC (diving support vessel) and they had an announcement on the news. When one of the guys came down who was in charge I said ‘look, there’s something happening in Thailand. I don’t know what it is but my son’s out there and if it’s something major I might have to go out there.”
He continued: “I was trying to ring all day and into the night and then I got one guy outside Krabi who told me it was a mess. By then the death toll on the news had gone from 10, to 100, to 1,000.”
Dave asked for the ship to divert so he could travel to Thailand via Dubai to look for his son, not knowing if he was alive or dead. After a fraught trip by sea and air Dave arrived in Phuket where he had heard there was a makeshift British Embassy set up in the area. After landing, he managed to find the ‘embassy’ on the first floor of a carpet warehouse where an official assumed he was there for the relief effort because he was still dressed in his heavy riggers’ boots and overalls.
“I said I’m looking for my son and if he’s fine, which I hope he is, then I have a month off and I can do most things you need out here. He said ‘okay, I’ll help you Dave. So they got these little paper filing records, like a card index, where they’d been collecting information and he goes ‘oh, maybe this could be your son. This is how fluky and lucky it really was.
“He got a Thai lady to come over and she rang the hospital that this card referred to. The card said what the injuries were and a male in his mid-20s. I can’t give you the exact information that was on it and god knows whether it’s my son or not. I don’t know. They rang the hospital, she speaks in Thai, and they hand the phone to this guy who’s injured and I don’t know who it is. I took the phone and said ‘hello, this is Dave, is that you John?’ and he replied ‘yes it is dad’. Amazing. I couldn’t believe it. I asked how he was and he said he was a mess. I told him don’t worry, I’ll be there soon thinking it was the hospital in Phuket. It was about a three hour taxi ride back up towards Bangkok.”
Dave arrived at Maharat Nakhon Ratchasima Hospital to find his son fighting a bad infection. Dave spent the next two weeks helping surgeons by cleaning his son’s wounds. He said: “The wounds looked very much like RTA (road traffic accident) wounds because they’re full of grit and full of muck, and they were having to cleanse and clean them, cutting off the tissue which is called debridement, which is what I ended up doing in the hospital theatre.”
Two weeks after being hospitalised, John was moved to a hospital near Bangkok and a month after the tsunami he was flown back to the UK on a stretcher across six rows of lowered seats. When he arrived back on UK soil he was admitted to Whiston Hospital where he underwent a sciatic nerve transplant from his right Achilles to his left.
As a result of the injuries he suffered in the horrific ordeal, John has been left with scarring across his body, including his stomach, arms and most significantly his lower left leg, in which he has no sensation. But while he was in hospital, he was told there was a possibility he would never walk again, shattering his confidence and leaving him unable to eat for days. Despite the difficult prognosis, and being told it would be 18 months before he learned to walk again in just a few months, Dave began teaching his son physics and maths so he could attend Fort William in Scotland and complete specialist courses meaning he would be able to get a job as an assistant life support technician (someone who works to ensure the safety of divers).
When John was discharged from hospital Dave would take him to the gym for four hours a day and April rolled around, they travelled to the Scottish Highlands where they spent two weeks completing the ALST certificates. Twenty years on from the disaster which nearly claimed his life John lives in Huyton with his girlfriend, Michelle, and two daughters, aged four and 15. He can walk and he can play football which at one time he was told he wouldn’t be able to do. He is now a life support technician and spends weeks at a time working abroad on vessels, having arrived home from working in the Persian Gulf just days before the 20 year anniversary.
Reflecting on that nightmare experience and how he felt afterwards, he said: “I felt lucky, I felt fortunate that I survived to be honest, because a lot of people lost their lives and I felt really fortunate that I was still alive. That’s how I felt and I just felt extremely lucky. I felt loved, I have a good dad who cares for me and came out, he’s been there for me all the way. Even now, after all this, getting back to work, keeping me sane, getting me back to normality. I felt really fortunate and I just felt lucky.”
