Survivor story

I woke to the shaking of the ground. My family was already awake and staring out the window, I looked at the clock 2:56am. I got out of bed and ran over to a separate window, I lost my breath for a moment as I watched the peak of Mt Tarawera explode into a million hot fireballs. All I could hear was the beating of my own heart and the screams from other witnesses and the cries of young kids. It took me a while to realize what was happening, then it finally sunk in. We were in the middle of the most historic volcanic eruption in New Zealand's history.

We all assembled down stairs and started to try figure out a plan of what we were going to do. We thought about all the places that would be safe for us to go, but as we watched the eruption getting bigger and stronger we knew that we had no choice but to get out of there as soon as possible.

We decided we would have to move and find shelter elsewhere, even if it took us all night and all day, we just wanted to leave. As soon as we got outside we saw all the village people running for cover and trying to find their loved ones, we couldn't stay to long though, at about 3:26am the eruption was still going full blast, we had traveled about 1km before we stopped for a rest, even though we were that far away we still had smoke and ash following us like a shadow.

It took us about 2 hours to finally get out of the smoky fowl air, we had lost some fellow members along the way from the ash and the fumes, so everyone was mourning as well as freaking out. We sat and watched the eruption for what felt like forever but was just a few hours. We stayed there for a little while once the eruption had finished but started back the next day. Some people refused to go back so they stayed there, but most of us didn't care if we didn't make it back alive, we just wanted to see if our families were alive, to us that was the only thing that mattered.