Thais Evacuate after Big Wave Hits Village

About one hundred people in southern Thailand were evacuated Sunday when a large wave flooded their coastal village, a local official said.

The three-to-four meter high wave inundated a shore on the Gulf of Thailand, causing floods of one meter deep in a village of Chumphon province, according to provincial governor Pinich Charoenpanich.

He said officials helped evacuate about a hundred people to a safe place further 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," he told AFP.

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.