Moments later, many of the people who had been lying on the sand had vanished.
"We're looking at 500 to 1,000 dead, easy," he said, taking issue with the official fatality figures.
A street on the Thai island of Phuket, a popular beach destination, is littered with vehicles and debris after the area was hit by tsunamis.
(Karim Khamzin -- AP)
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The Thai government ordered tourists to evacuate Phuket and other flooded beach resorts. Hundreds of Western and Asian visitors, as well as local residents, were evacuated by sea and air from other small islands off the coast, including 200 people plucked from the tiny island of Ko Phi Phi, featured in the Hollywood film "The Beach."
Helicopters surveyed the islands of the Andaman Sea for stranded divers and snorkelers while rescue workers pulled more than 100 people from the water, officials said.
Besides the deaths on Phuket, officials reported fatalities in Phang Nga, Ranong, Krabi, Satun and Trang.
In Malaysia, authorities also ordered the evacuation of communities along the country's northwest coast after 42 people were killed on the seafront in the states of Penang and Kedah. Several of the dead were jet skiers and picnickers swept out to sea, while many of the missing were fishermen who had set out in the morning and had yet to return by nightfall.
"Our country has never experienced such a disaster before," Malaysia's deputy prime minister, Najib Razak, told reporters. But he acknowledged, "Among the tsunami-hit nations, we are the least affected." He added that about 200 houses had been swept away by the flood.
In Indonesia, authorities said they had dispatched senior officials to Aceh to oversee rescue operations. That effort will be hampered by an ongoing war between government forces and separatist rebels.
The province has been largely off-limits to foreign aid organizations and journalists since the government launched a new military offensive last year. Sutedjo Yuwono, secretary to Indonesia's welfare minister, said international aid groups and journalists would now be allowed to enter Aceh but that access would be tightly regulated.
The small Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives, which consists of 1,200 coral islands resting barely a yard above sea level, declared a state of emergency and closed the international airport after two-thirds of the capital, Male, was inundated. In addition to the 32 dead, 51 people were missing, authorities said.
A Maldivian government spokesman told Reuters by cell phone that none of the dead were believed to be tourists, who are drawn to the Maldives by its idyllic palm-fringed islands and famed scuba diving.
Severe flooding also struck the Seychelles, a string of islands off the east coast of Africa. A six-foot ocean surge disrupted power to hundreds of homes and abnormally high tides repeatedly littered the airport runway with fish, forcing firefighters to hose down the airfield between flights.
Goodman reported from Bangkok. Staff writer Michael Dobbs in Waligama, Sri Lanka, correspondent John Lancaster in Cochin, India, and special correspondents Rama Lakshmi in Madras, India, and Noor Huda Ismail in Jakarta contributed to this report.
