About one hundred people in southern Thailand were evacuated Sunday and several tourists were stranded when a large wave flooded a coastal village, a local official said.
The three-to-four metre (10-to-13 feet) high wave inundated a shore on the Gulf of Thailand, causing floods of one metre deep and damaging houses in a village in Chumphon province, according to provincial governor Pinich Charoenpanich.
He said officials helped evacuate about a hundred people to a safe place farther inland, and were expected to return home when the waters had subsided and the wind dropped. There were no casualties reported.
"This high wave would be normal for fisherman out at sea but this time it happened near the shore, so it caused flooding on the land," Pinich told AFP.
"There were a dozen local tourists stranded when the high wave hit this morning. They were staying at homestays in village houses located on the shore, but they were safe," he added later.
The country was battered by an Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that killed an estimated 5,400 people in Thailand alone.
The tsunami, triggered by an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, sent giant waves crashing into countries around the Indian Ocean, killing more than 220,000 people.
