Normally at this time of year Phuket island is a tropical dream paradise with perfect weather, white sand beaches and deliciously translucent sea water. It's high season time in Phuket and tourists from all over the world are on Patong Beach to spend their holidays in the luxurious Phuket hotels and enjoy fun in the sun.
On Christmas Day, the perfect white-sand beaches of Patong and Kata Noi were packed with thousands of holidaymakers from Australia, Europe and North America, lying on the beach under huge umbrellas or playing with their children in the water.
Today, 26 December, Phuket's paradise Patong Beach was washed away by a series of huge Tsunami waves that left Thailand's holiday island dealing with one of the biggest natural disaster of modern times. All day at Phuket hospitals, doctors, nurses and volunteers were struggling to cope with the hundreds of injured and traumatized people.
The first thing people on the beaches noticed was a small surge and the sea-water mounted slightly up the beach, then suddenly the sea retreated, exposing more than 200 meters (656 feet) of sand and rocks never exposed before. Speedboats that were anchored near the beach were suddenly standing on the sand-bottom and underwater rocks lay dry. There was nothing left but sand and the sea had vanished as the plug of a bathtub is pulled.
Holidaymakers and local Thai people were staring amazed at the new stretch of beach and the vanishing sea and did not understand what was happening. Some locals started laughing and ran out to collect the huge amount of fish that that the retreating sea had left behind on the new stretch of beach.
Minutes later people noticed a series of giant waves coming towards Patong Beach, at first those on the beach seemed like hypnotized and did nothing else than look at the approaching huge of waves in mounting horror, then people started shouting and running inland, away front the huge mountain of water coming towards the beach at high speed.
First a smaller wave hit the beach and suddenly people were standing knee-deep in the water and beach-chairs were floating all over the place. Then a second much larger wave of about 4.5 meters (15 feet) high hit the shore. The water of this wave simply smashed everything in its path. It came up over the beach, rolling over the beach road running parallel with Phuket's sea-front and into the shop-houses and hotels even sweeping away large four-wheel drive vehicles.
The meters high water rushed into the first floors of hotels on the other side of beach-road, and smashed windows of shops and businesses fronting beach-road. People that could escape were quickly moving up the hill that fronts the beach to a safe height., where doctors among the vacationers tended to their wounds.
Immediately after the worst was over, local Thai people started to carry wounded vacationers and Thais off to hospitals and clinics in the back of their pick-up trucks as also rescuers and officials started to react to the disaster.
As night fell, police had sealed off Patong and the other beaches on the West coast of Phuket and were only allowing emergency vehicles and rescue workers through the roadblocks. The sirens of ambulances carrying people to the Phuket hospitals, situated mostly on the eastern side of the island, could be heard for more than 12-hours following the Tsunami tidal wave strike.
It will be days before Thai authorities on Phuket island will have a full view of the impact of the disaster, and perhaps years before Phuket recovers its reputation as a tropical paradise.
