PATONG businesspeople have dismissed a plan for a night tsunami wave escape drill, the Director of the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation, San Kanthawong, said today.

Instead, Phuket is to have a day drill from 10.30am on September 13, and similar drills will be held along the coast in all six Andaman provinces - Phuket plus Ranong, Phang Nga, Krabi, Trang and Satun.

''Phuket needs a drill at night but the Patong businesses say it's when they are working and need to make money,'' Khun San said.

The Phuket drill will involve a mock evacuation and the opportunity to test the alarms at 19 tsunami warning towers along Phuket's beaches and the total of 79 along the entire Andaman coast.

Phuketwan remains concerned that a second tsunami, especially one that arrived in the early hours of the morning, could be as devastating as the first tsunami because evacuation processes are ill-defined and not mandatory.

The tsunami on December 26, 2004, killed 5400 people in Thailand and about 220,000 around the Indian Ocean.

A real early-morning tsunami alert on Phuket earlier this year left some resorts going ahead with the evacuation of guests while other resorts opted not to disturb them, letting them sleep on.

As the decision by Patong businesspeople shows, awareness of the danger and the need for eternal vigilance is fading with time. In a real alert, the DDPM contacts resorts along the coast any way it can, telephoning and despatching officers on foot to rouse resort managers and alert them to the danger.

Phuketwan believes evacuation should be mandatory in the coastal region that was affected by the 2004 tsunami, and that resorts and guesthouses in a wider area should also be obliged to alert their guests to prevent holidaymakers heading towards the wave.

Phuketwan was alarmed recently to visit a five-star resort where several pages of a guest's guide were devoted to earthquakes, but only one paragraph, the last item in the guide, described what to do in a tsunami.

Memories remain sharper in the village of Nam Khem in Phang Nga, where 800 villagers perished in 2004, and where everyone now evacuates at the slightest hint that a real tsunami might be on its way again.

If the sound is working, the coastal towers provide a useful daylight hours warning when people are on the beaches but their sound can be blown out to sea and their value is limited between sunset and dawn.

A survey of tourists earlier this year showed low recognition of the blue and white hazard evacuation signs that were put up along the coast in reaction to the devastation of the tsunami. Phuketwan believes that in addition to being warned not to swim at Phuket beaches when red flags are flying, all arriving tourists need to be told who will wake them at 3am if a second tsunami is reported to be on the way.

A second tsunami is considered unlikely, but Hawaii once had two in the space of 14 years.

Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaungsuban is expected to come to Phuket from Bangkok to oversee the drill on September 13.