PHUKET: People who were on Phuket and along the Andaman coast when the tsunami rolled in on a perfect morning on Boxing Day, December 26, 2004, fall into two distinct categories.

There are those who cannot forget, and those who do not wish to remember.

Those who cannot forget will always recall what took place that day, seven years ago, because of the extraordinary impact it had on their lives, and the lives of others.

Others who were there at the time - those who do not wish to remember - would rather move on. This, then, is human nature. To remember, or to move on?

Some of us are captives of the powerful past. Others resolutely shake off sorrow and look towards a trouble-free horizon.

We've been weighing this philosophical issue now for seven years. Do we forget?

Should Phuket and the Andaman stop the memorial memory-making every anniversary and simply allow the tsunami to pass into history?

While there is always something to be said for facing the future in a positive frame of mind, to ignore the past is to risk reliving it.

In our view, the tsunami must never be forgotten.

Although a second Indian Ocean tsunami is a distant and unlikely prospect, this year's Japan tsunami demonstrated that big-wave devastation is not something anyone who lives near an ocean can ignore.

A friend visited Phuket this week. He was on Aceh, the Indonesian province where more than 160,000 were killed, within two days of the 2004 tsunami striking.

On Aceh, the death and devastation were appalling, he remembers. Yet on one island closer to the centre of the earthquake, virtually the entire population managed to flee to higher ground, safely.

The reason? They retained in their culture the message passed down from generation to generation about a previous tsunami that had occurred more than 100 years earlier.

Powerful memories take on a life of their own. The tsunami cannot and must not be forgotten, especially in the villages and resorts that sit in the same positions on Phuket and along the Andaman coast as they did in 2004.

Technology may give everyone an advanced warning in the dim event of a second tsunami coming. But it would be a mistake to assume that all will go perfectly.

The question that visiting tourists need to ask themselves and their resort management is this: ''If a second tsunami did happen to arrive at 3am, in the middle of the night, who will be warned? And who will wake me?''

Seven years on, it's also time to lay to rest the issue of how many people were killed in Thailand by the tsunami. Even after such a long period, there are still those who get it wrong.

The total death toll was 5395 people, approximately half of them Thais and half of them tourists and Burmese. Yet the idea still persists - even among senior officials - that there are somehow an additional 2817 people still missing.

Some international news organisations still - quite erroneously - add the ''missing'' to the confirmed deaths, creating the false total toll of more than 8000 people.

This is wrong. The figure of 5395 includes the vast majority of the so-called ''missing,'' who more properly should have been described as ''unaccounted for.''

As it retreated, the tsunami worked like a washing machine, churning along the shore, unable to move back in a straight line out to sea because of the volume of water behind it.

So the bodies of rich tourists in five-star resorts were swept into workers' camps, and the workers and their families and villagers along the coast were carried into the grounds of five-star resorts.

In a remarkable forensic exercise, scientists, dentists and police from all over the world worked together to identify all the nameless bodies. They almost succeeded.

Of the 5395 victims, less than 400 remain unidentified. Today the ''missing'' number only slightly higher than the number of unidentified bodies.

The problem was created because as the international Thai Tsunami Victim Identification unit gave names back to victims through 2005, other government departments failed to note that the ''missing'' were actually not an additional number.

Inside the TTVI, the figure of nameless ''missing'' bodies was revised down each day as people were successfully identified.

Outside the TTVI, other government departments simply stuck with the original ''missing'' figure of 2817 people.

At the time of the first anniversary of the tsunami, when the false figure of 8000-plus victims was actually recorded in an official commemorative book, Phuketwan journalists telephoned 14 embassies.

We had to call 14 embassies because no single authority was allowed to reveal the country-by-country tally, only the individual embassies could reveal individual tallies.

In the official booklet, 917 foreigners were said to be missing. Yet the 14 countries we called - the ones most likely to have large death tolls - reported that only 59 of their nationals were still missing.

The official government first anniversary handout got it very wrong.

The total number of victims of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand remains 5395. We are extremely glad to be able to say we saved much pain and sorrow by clarifying that 2800 others did not die.

Retaining an accurate record of history is essential. That's another reason why the memory of the tsunami should not be allowed to fade.