'We feel lucky to have survived' - Croghan teenager

A group of teens from Offaly have returned home safe and well after surviving the 6.7 magnitude earthquake that hit Kos on July 28, killing two tourists and injuring more than 500 people.

Eighteen-year-old Ava Bolger from Croghan, and a group of seven other teens froms Tullamore, Killeigh and Geashill travelled on their first holiday abroad without their parents to the idllyic Greek island of Kos.

They had enjoyed four fun-filled days at the popular holiday destination until disaster struck in the early hours of Friday morning, when an earthquake off the coast of Turkey and Kos in the Aegean Sea, hit. A Turkish and a Swedish tourist, aged 39 and 22, died when the roof of a popular bar in Kos collapsed.

'We travelled out on Saturday, it was a fab place. The hotel, the beach, was beautiful. We went to a waterpark on Tuesday and we had the best time. It was one of the girls' birthdays and we went to Bar Street, where all the bars are, and where the two people were killed during the earthquake. We had planned to go there on Thursday night but I guess we were lucky.

'The day it happened, Thursday, we had been to Paradise Beach and went jet skiing. We had the best day and we had been planning to go out that night, to go to Bar Street, but one of the girls wasn't feeling well, so we just came home to the apartment, played Uno, and went to bed around eleven.

'The girls were in the bedroom, and I was on the couch bed out in the kitchen. It was about one o'clock in the morning when I could hear banging on the door. So I text the girls in the bedroom to stop, but they said it wasn't them. There was a group from Dublin and I thought it might have been them messing, but it kept going on and on, so I rang down to reception to complain. The manager wnet to speak to them and they told him they hadn't been doing anything, that they were just in their room the whole time.

'So I thought, 'let them have their fun', and I went back to bed, and then around ten minutes later it happened. The whole building started to shake really badly. Plates flew out of the presses, my phone charger flew out of the wall, I couldn't get the lights on - the electricity had gone.

'My first instinct was that it was an earthquake. I knew I had to get to the girls in the bedroom. Eventually I got in there, and one of the girls who had been asleep had knocked her head on something. We were on the top floor, and I could see the dust falling from the roof above me, I was so afraid it would fall in. So I told everyone to put their heads down.

'I think we went into shock then. When it finally stopped, it felt like ages, but it was probably just over a minute in total, the lads came banging on our door and told us everyone was going outside. We stayed outside that night, and there was another 4.4 magnitude quake that night. They gave us blankets and bottles of water.

'The next day, all of these beautiful monuments that we had seen had fallen down. There were loads of tremors the next day. Everyone was exhausted. There was no running water so we had to do without showers or anything like that until we flew home on Saturday.

'But we were so lucky, firstly that we didn't go down to Bar Street that night. And we were lucky that we had people looking after us. The people in the hotel couldn't have been nicer. They were a husband and wife and they were so good to us, they were like parents, they were constantly checking on us and making sure we were okay. There was also a group from Clare and Wexford who were older and took care of us,' Ava said.

'The owner was in as much shock as we were because he said he had never experienced anything like it before. He said the last earthquake of that magnitude was in 1933 after World War I had ended. Thompson Holidays and Midland Travel were also very good. They rang us immediately to see if we wanted to leave earlier, but there was no point, the airport was packed,' she recalled.

Despite all this, Ava said it wouldn't stop her going back to Kos again.

'It was a beautiful place and everyone there was so friendly. I felt really sorry for the people because their livliehoods were destroyed. Shops selling alcohol had lost everything, everything was smashed. Beautiful monuments had completely fallen apart. There's a photo of us in front of a pier where all the boats were, and that had just completely disappeared.

'We were glad to be home. We all got emotional when we landed. We're still a bit shaken up because it was a huge deal to us, being away from home for the first time without our parents, but we're thankful that everyone's okay,' Croghan teenager concluded.