Cork: An Irishman who owns a bar in Phuket yesterday told of the continuing devastation as the emergency services continue to recover bodies following the tsunami disaster which engulfed the resort at the weekend.
Mr Tony Waters (47), who runs Lek Murphy's bar at Patong on Phuket said bodies continue to be washed ashore.
"The authorities have put the death toll at 1,500 but I expect it's going to continue to rise - we had more bodies being washed up here again today - the place really is devastated and we're all in a state of shock, you just can't imagine the scale of it," said Mr Waters.
Mr Waters, from Ballinlough in Cork city, said his pub which he runs with business partner, Mr Tony Ronayne from Kinsale, escaped the worst ravages of the tsunami and became a temporary shelter and contact point for many Irish tourists holidaying in the area.
"All the Irish tourists who had been in the bar in the days before the disaster are all accounted for and people have been ringing us from Ireland to find out how their loved ones are so we were able to put most of them in contact with home or else tell them they were okay."
"We were lucky, we're about 250 metres back from the beach and the water came up within 10 metres of the bar but between us and the beach is devastated - some people ran into a mall and went into the basement for shelter and were caught - they took out 60 bodies from there.
"I was up at the hospital today and there are still around 150 bodies which are unidentified, it's very bad but it could have been much worse, it hit here at 9.45 a.m. on St Stephen's Day and a lot of people were still back in their apartments after the night before.
"If it had hit around midnight on Christmas Night when there would have been hundreds more at parties on the beach, the death toll would have been even higher - as it is it's going to take this place years to return to normal, if it ever does," said Mr Waters.
Kinsale man Mr Ciarán Finnegan (42) had been living on Phuket for the past three months and was staying in Lek Murphy's in Patong when the tidal wave swamped the resort on Sunday morning.
"I saw them pull 10 bodies from the wreckage here yesterday and I expect they will pull even more out in the coming days - when the waves struck there was a panic as people rushed to the high ground," Mr Finnegan told the Evening Echo.
"The help that was given by the Thai people to European tourists was great - despite the fact that they had been left with nothing, they still gave people shelter in their homes and gave them half their food."