Nightmare of screams and tears

I was sitting in my bedroom at home in Sinabang, the little capital of the island of Simeulue, when the quake hit.

It was 11.15pm and I was watching a DVD. Akbar, my colleague in Concern, the Irish charity's project on the island, was in his bedroom, the other room in the house.

Like nearly all the tremors we've had, it started off as horizontal, with the floor shifting back and forth and the concrete walls bulging.

Normally I'm the first out of the door in an earthquake, but suddenly the motion became vertical and very violent and as I was running out of the bedroom door the lights failed and I was thrown against the wall by the movement of the floor.

I scrambled to my feet, but the house's water tank had been punctured, there was water all over the floor and I slipped and fell again. I got up again but once more I was thrown down and this time I smashed my arm against the wall.

The noise was terrifying, really loud and like a whipcrack, the sound of the brick and concrete being smashed apart.

The other noise was the screams from all around outside - it had started as soon as the quake hit. Screams and shouts and people praying and crying, and as the tremors got more violent the sound got worse and worse.

It was nightmarish - I got outside where it was pitch dark, and with all the howling and crying it was really scary, and I asked myself, will I ever get out of here?

Akbar had managed to get out of the house too, we were both scarred and scared but otherwise all right, and he told me that they said there was a tsunami coming, so we jumped into our pickup and drove to the west, to higher ground away from the sea.

We followed the flow of people ... it was like a host of people fleeing a biblical pestilence, entire families crammed on to motorcycles, a few in cars, many on foot, and we picked up maybe 20 people in the pickup as we went along.

The word spread that the tsunami was really coming now.

And as the world knows, the tsunami never arrived.

After an hour or two everyone realised the danger had passed. But people stayed up there in the open, even though the rain beat down furiously all night.

- INDEPENDENT