A primary school teacher from Trefin, holidaying in Thailand, has described how people wept, screamed and ran for higher ground as a tsunami warning sounded following a massive earthquake.

Richard Garrett, aged 27, was sitting by the pool with his girlfriend Dani Washbrook last Wednesday when news of the Indian Ocean-wide tsunami warning filtered through.

Richard said: “We heard a big siren on a van in the street and people started flustering around and grabbing stuff. A guy came out saying there was a tsunami warning and there was a tsunami coming.

“Then the people at the pool bar said ‘quick hurry you must go now’.

“All the staff were running around ushering everyone upstairs and we heard there was an 8.9 quake off Indonesia.”

The couple were then ushered into a conference room on the second floor of the hotel which was just 150 metres from the same coastline which was devastated by the tsunami in 2004.

Richard said: “Everyone else was panicking and you remember the pictures from the last tsunami so I thought maybe this is going to happen.

“The scariest bit was not knowing. The impression they were giving was that there was serious danger and some people were crying.”

Thoughts then turned to the safety of Richard’s brother Chris, of St Davids, who was in Bali at the time.

“I was really worried about my brother but I contacted him on Facebook and he got back to me to say he was okay,” he added.

Thankfully, within hours of being issued the tsunami warning alerts were lifted.