www.cnn.comTsunami toll rises above 33,000International community scrambles to help
Tuesday, December 28, 2004 Posted: 8:14 AM EST (1314 GMT)
(CNN) -- Two days after tsunamis swept across the Indian Ocean from Thailand to Somalia, the death toll has risen to more than 33,000 as the international community scrambles to help the region cope with the disaster.
Families are flocking to makeshift morgues seeking lost loved ones as hundreds of thousands have been left homeless in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Authorities across the region are running out of places to put the dead -- lining them up in schools and stacking them in the street -- as food aid and other supplies for survivors are making their way to affected areas.
The United Nations is asking donor countries to dig deeper, saying this will likely be the costliest disaster ever.
"People need help fast," said one man in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where flags were at half-staff.
"There's no power, there's no petrol, there's no movement, there's no support getting through to the injured, and I believe there are bodies that need to be identified and transported out of there. With this heat, sanitation problems will arise."
The magnitude 9.0 quake struck about 7 a.m. Sunday (0000 GMT) and was centered about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off the coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island at a depth of about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers).
The tsunamis' paths left massive, indiscriminate destruction in areas that included some of the world's richest tourist sites and impoverished villages.
Nearly 48 hours later, no one was under any illusion that the death toll would not rise significantly. (Disease threat)
More than 18,000 people have been reported dead in Sri Lanka. Most of them were in the eastern district of Batticaloa, authorities said.
Thousands were missing, an estimated one million were displaced and an estimated 250,000 were homeless. (Shock and loss)
The Sri Lankan government declared a state of emergency, and, along with the government of the Maldives, requested international assistance, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported.
About 20,000 Sri Lankan soldiers and naval personnel have launched relief and rescue efforts.
India sent six warships carrying supplies, along with helicopters.
Italy, France and Pakistan also sent help to Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka has been in the throes of a civil war, and land mines uprooted by the tidal waves were hampering relief efforts.
But Jeffrey Lunstead, the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka, said he was told the Tamil Tiger rebels in the northeast and government forces were cooperating in the aftermath of the disaster.
"That's a good sign," he told CNN.
India also was reeling from the aftermath of the quake and tsunamis. Press Trust of India, the government news agency, said at least 8,000 Indians were killed and more bodies were being recovered.
Along India's southeastern coast, thousands of fishermen who were at sea when the waves thundered ashore have not returned.
Along the coast, brick foundations were all that remained of village homes.
In Tamil Nadu state, 4,500 people were confirmed dead, and officials said 3,000 died on the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, where dozens of aftershocks were centered.
Asian government officials conceded Monday that they failed to issue public warnings that could have saved many lives. (Full story)
Efforts to provide survivors with food and shelter were hampered by the overwhelming magnitude of the damage.
In Thailand, authorities said at least 1,010 people were dead and hundreds missing along the country's west coast -- home to 40 percent of Thailand's $10 billion tourist industry.
Khun Poom Jensen, the 21-year-old autistic grandson of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, was among those killed.
One of the heaviest hit areas was Phuket, where 130 people were dead and as many as 600 people were believed to have been washed out to sea.
Many of the dead and missing are believed to be foreign nationals who were on the beach when the massive waves hit.
One of the survivors was a 20-month-old Swedish boy who turned up in the Phuket International Hospital.
It was only after the news media published his photo that relatives in Europe contacted the hospital to identify him. The child -- Hannes Bergstrom -- was finally reunited with his uncle and grandmother. His mother is still missing, while his father and grandfather were located in another hospital. (Full story)
John Irvine of Britain's ITN television was enjoying the beach In Phuket Sunday morning and ran into his bungalow to get a camera. When he returned, he saw "this wall of water heading our way, and my wife screamed to me."
"She grabbed our daughter, and I looked frantically for my five-year-old son," Irvine told CNN. "He was looking out to sea. He was mesmerized, hypnotized by the wall of water."
Irvine said he grabbed the boy and "ran as hard as I could," before being washed 50 yards into a mangrove swamp.
By dawn on Tuesday, many bodies could be seen littering the shoreline.
Indonesia may have been the worst hit of all.
Information from Aceh province -- closest to the epicenter, which was about 100 miles off the coast -- has been slow in coming because communications were cut off and because of a rebel insurgency based in the area.
Vice President Muhammad Yusuf Kalla returned from a trip to the province's capital, Banda Aceh, and said the death toll could reach 5,000 to 10,000 in the capital alone -- more than doubling Indonesia's current death toll.
At least 4,731 people are reported dead in Indonesia, officials said.
In the Maldives, 46 people are dead and more than 70 missing, according to Hassan Sobir, the Maldives high commissioner.
India and Pakistan have sent equipment to the Maldives, where communication had been re-established with the northern most of the widely scattered islands south of India -- most rising barely five feet above sea level, Sobir said.
The southern islands, however, remained "out of reach," he said.
"The entire Maldives, I think, for a moment disappeared from the planet Earth," he said. "Some islands may have completely disappeared, we don't know yet. But all the islands have been affected."
As far away as Somalia on Africa's east coast, reports trickled in of fishermen swept out to sea and lost swimmers, but those reports were unconfirmed.
Among the dead are at least 61 from outside the region.
That number includes 13 Italians, 11 Britons, 10 Norwegians, eight Americans, six Australians, six French, four Austrians, and three Danes, officials from those countries were reported by The Associated Press as saying, with hundreds more reported missing.
No warning
The tsunamis struck with no warning at those in coastal areas -- particularly Indonesia, so close to the source -- as no warning system exists for the Indian Ocean, said Eddie Bernard, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine and Environmental Labs in Seattle, Washington.
Such tsunamis are much more common around the Pacific Rim than in the Indian Ocean.
The quake represented the energy released from a rupture in the earth's crust more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) long, the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) said.
It was the strongest earthquake since 1964 and tied a 1952 quake in Kamchatka, Russia, as the fourth-strongest since such measurements began in 1899.
The quake hit a year after the 6.6-magnitude quake in Bam, Iran, which killed more than 30,000 people, injured another 30,000 and destroyed 85 percent of the buildings in the city.