A woman who survived a tsunami has opened up about its impact 20 years on.
The Boxing Day tsunami which took the lives of more than 227,000 people on 26 December 2004 is a disaster that will never be forgotten.
For Sharon Howard, it was something that not only harmed herself, but also took the lives of her two sons and her fiancé.
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She had been holidaying in Thailand at the time of its impact and were enjoying her time at the beach resort of Khao Lak.
However, the family wasn’t to know that 100-foot waves and an earthquake in the Indian Ocean would trigger a disaster which was 23,000 times stronger than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb in Japan.
It was upon this impact that David Page, 44, Mason, eight, and six-year-old Taylor lost their lives.
Thailand was just one country on a list of many others which were bombarded by the waves, including Indonesia, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.
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Sharon, who is now 57, visited her old hotel today and laid flowers to commemorate the awful tragedy.
The Sun reported her as saying: “I was dreading going back to Thailand, absolutely dreading it, but it’s something I had to do for myself.
“My family don’t really understand but we all grieve differently and they prefer to leave it in the past and remember them as they were.
“But I knew I would regret it if I didn’t go.”
She added that she feels ‘more emotional now than I did when it happened’ because ‘it was like a part of my brain shut down for years’
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Explaining that she had thought about her loved ones ‘every day for the last 20 years’, adding: “The boys are around me constantly; they are in my heart.
“You learn to live without them but you never forget. You never heal.
“I see their friends around still and what they are doing and it makes me wonder what my boys would have been doing — if they’d have had children, what they would look like. But I’ll never know.”
While many victims lost their lives on the beaches when the waves his, Sharon was in her ground-floor hotel room with David as Mason was on a sun lounger outside of the room and Taylor was at the resort’s kids’ club.
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Sharon said she heard a ‘loud and powerful noise’ and opened the door, before David told her to close it as ‘the water will go down’.
But instead, the water ‘crashed through the patio door and we were pushed into the corner by the weight of it’ where she suffered a head injury.
Telling her husband that she loved him before passing out, she came around to find David had passed away and was under the water in front of her.
So, she tried to find her sons.
“I knew I had to go and look for the boys.”
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Unfortunately, the boys had died on impact.
Sharon on the other hand, was only saved after an Australian holidaymaker called Ian Walsh dangled a beach towel from an upper level and pulled her up.
Following on from the disaster, it took three months for Taylor’s body to be returned to the UK , sadly David and Mason's bodies were not found for months.
After coming back for 15 years to lay flowers at the new hotel which was erected after the original hotel was destroyed by the waves, she shared how she had hoped there would be an official memorial ceremony today.
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However, when she called to ask the British Embassy in Thailand, nobody called her back.
The day took away everything from her, and it should have been a day of celebration.
That’s because David had proposed to her on Christmas Day, the day before he died.
She said: “When David and I got engaged the day before it was one of the happiest moments of my life.
“I’d been single for a while.
“I’d been married to Mason and Taylor’s father, but he left me when I was six months’ pregnant.
“I’d been on my own so it was nice to think I’d got a family again.
“I was looking forward to the future, but it was all sadly taken away from me.”
Britt Jones