Mourners in Sri Lanka buried their dead with bare hands today while rescue services struggled to reach areas of Indonesia still cut off from the rest of the world, two days after a tsunami devastated Indian Ocean coastlines and killed more than 50 000 people.
The vast majority of the dead in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and the Maldives were local residents, but hundreds of foreigners enjoying Christmas holidays in the sun were also killed by giant waves caused by Sunday’s earthquake of the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale.
As aid agencies rallied to deal with the aftermath of what the United Nations has said may prove the costliest natural disaster in history, there were fears that the death toll could eventually double. Officials in Sri Lanka said today that nearly 19 000 people had died, and estimated that the toll in that country alone could rise to 25 000.
”This is unprecedented,” said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief coordinator of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, while the International Red Cross warned that malaria and cholera could add to the scale of the disaster.
Desperate foreigners sought kin missing from holidays in south-east Asia, where news of an unclaimed, blond two-year-old boy brought dozens of hopeful parents to a hospital in Thailand’s resort island of Phuket. They all left disappointed – except for his Swedish uncle.
A man who identified himself only as Jim, said he found his nephew, Hannes Bergström, by looking on the internet.
”This is a miracle, the biggest thing that could happen,” he said.
Almost a third of the dead were children. Many thousands of people were still missing, and millions homeless in 11 countries from Indonesia to Somalia. About 19 000 people were killed in Indonesia, more than 4 000 in India and more than 1 000 in Thailand. In Sri Lanka’s severely hit town of Galle, officials mounted a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay bodies of the dead on roads for collection and burial. Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, residents took on burial efforts with forks or even their bare hands.
Rescue workers battled to reach isolated coasts on the Indonesian island of Sumatra nearest the epicentre of the earthquake, which was the most powerful in 40 years. Soldiers and volunteers combed coastal districts and dug into rubble of destroyed houses to seek out survivors and retrieve the dead.
”We are working 24 hours to get out people out,” said Red Cross worker Tamin Faisil in Banda Aceh on Sumatra.
In Thailand’s once-thriving resorts, volunteers dragged scores of corpses – including many foreign tourists – from beaches, inland pools and the debris of once-ritzy hotels. The stench of death hung in the air for along a 30km stretch of beach in Thailand’s southern province of Phang Na, just above Phuket.
The country’s prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, warned that his country’s toll could double. Amid the devastation, however, were some miraculous stories of survival. In Malaysia, a 20-day-old baby was found alive on a floating mattress. She and her family were later reunited. The two-year-old boy in Phuket was recovering after he was found sitting alone on a road. Reports said his mother was missing, but that his father had been located at a different hospital.
For others, the pain of their loss was almost impossible to come to terms with.
”Where are my children?” asked 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to Sunday’s epicentre. ”Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I’ve lost everything.”
The disaster could be history’s costliest, with ”many billions of dollars” of damage, said UN undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination.
Offers of aid had come in from around the world and hundreds of relief flights from two dozen countries were expected within the next 48 hours, he added
Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and no health services, he said.
Scores of people were also killed in Malaysia, Burma, Bangladesh, and the Maldives as the tsunami travelled 4 500km across the Indian Ocean to Africa, wreaking death and destruction as far as Somalia, where hundreds were killed, and the Seychelles, where three died.
It was the deadliest known tsunami since the one caused by the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, also located off Sumatra, which killed an estimated 36 000 people. Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate public warnings of the waves could have saved lives.
The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours later. But governments insisted they couldn’t have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.
For most people around the shores across the region, the only warning of the disaster came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, drawn back by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a towering wall of water. – Guardian Unlimited Â