On 26 December 2004, Amber Owen, 28, from Milton Keynes, was on holiday in Phuket when a magnitude-9.1 earthquake struck under the sea in northern Indonesia. It claimed the lives of 230,000 people, but she taken to safety by elephant, Ningnong who she was riding at the time the first wave hit.

Sharon Howard has returned to Thailand to mark the 20th anniversary of losing her six-year-old son Taylor, his eight-year-old brother Mason and fiancé, David Page, 44

A woman who survived a tsunami shared the devastation of the impact of the waves. It has been 20 years since the Boxing Day tsunami which killed of more than 227,000 people on 26 December 2004. There were little survivors out of those who were swept away by the waves, and for Sharon Howard, it took ‘everything’ from her.

John Metcalfe, a Liverpool man living in Thailand, survived the Boxing Day Tsunami 20 years ago, enduring harrowing injuries and a fight for life against overwhelming odds with the help of his dad

20 years later, one of the Matara train’s carriages sits outside the city’s Tsunami Museum as a haunting reminder of Boxing Day of 2004. The effects of the 9.3 Richter scale earthquake did not relent until eight hours later, when unaware swimmers off the coast of South Africa felt the force of the waves.

This Boxing Day marks the 20th anniversary of the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history. On December 26, 2004, the region was struck by a devastating earthquake, measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale, triggering a massive tsunami that claimed the lives of about 230,000 people across 14 countries.