Effect of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on Thailand

It left behind unprecedented damage and destruction in six provinces of Thailand, impacting 407 villages, completely destroying 47 of them, including prominent tourist resorts like Khao Lak.

Almost all the major beaches on Phuket’s west coast, including Kamala, Patong, Karon, and Kata, suffered substantial damage, as did some resorts and communities along the island's southern shores.

Due to the topography of the seabed, coastline and reefs offshore, the tsunami waves piled on top of themselves and in doing so, create the infamous 'disappearing sea effect' which enticed many tourists to their deaths.

Many Thai-owned hotels and other small businesses were ruined, and the Thai government provided large amounts of capital to enable the recovery of the private sector.

And high-density polyethylene piping was found to perform exceptionally well: as roads crumbled, the subterranean flexible pipelines formed new contours and rarely separated.

[3] The confidence of European tourists in travelling to places such as Phuket also took some time to recover, which is one reason why Thailand strongly backed the installed tsunami warning system.

By 12 January some of the affected resorts in the south had re-opened, and the Thai government had begun an advertising campaign to bring visitors back to the area as quickly as possible, though everyone knew it would be quite a while before Thailand was in a state of normalcy, professionals guessed around ten years.

Democratic Party politicians said that Smith has failed to produce any evidence for his warnings at the time, and accused Thaksin of politicising the tsunami tragedy.

Audible warning sirens alerted the local population to the possibility of a tsunami roughly 2 hours before estimated landfall, allowing the populace to move to higher ground inland.

Notably, the Takua Pa District in Phang Nga province, north of Phuket, was among Thailand's most severely affected areas, with significant casualties, including a considerable number of Burmese laborers.

Khao Lak was the coastal area of Thailand hardest hit by the tsunami resulting from the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.

[6] The final death toll was over 4,000, with local unofficial estimates topping 10,000 due to the lack of accurate government censuses and the fact that much of the migrant Burmese population was not documented nor recognized as legal residents.

[9] Others among the casualties were well-known Finnish musician and TV host Aki Sirkesalo and his family, and Imre von Polgar, guitarist for the Swedish rock band, The Watermelon Men.

Almost four years old at the time, a young girl was swept away at Khao Lak and remained the subject of a media-covered intensive search despite being formally identified in August 2005 as a victim.

This is due to increasing doubts about the reliability of the classification on the basis of visual identification of badly decomposed bodies into "Thai" and "foreign" categories.