Mon Dec 27, 2004 08:31 AM ET
By Chamintha Thilakarathna
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - The death toll in a tsunami that slammed into coasts from India to Indonesia topped 22,000 Monday as rescuers scoured the sea for missing tourists and fears of disease grew as soldiers raced to recover rotting bodies.
Sri Lankan military spokesman Daya Ratnayaka said 10,029 people had been killed in Sri Lanka alone, while a government minister said 200 foreign tourists were feared dead.
Other areas worst affected areas by Sunday's tsunami were southern India, where officials reported more than 6,600 dead, northern Indonesia with about 5,000 drowned and Thailand's southern tourist isles and beaches where up to 839 lost their lives.
The world's biggest earthquake in 40 years triggered the wall of water up to 33 feet high that fanned out across the Bay of Bengal, flattening houses, hurling fishing boats onto roads, sending cars spinning through swirling waters into hotel lobbies and sucking sunbathers, babies and fishermen out to sea.
In Banda Aceh, capital of Indonesia's Aceh province near the epicenter of the magnitude 9.0 quake, troops were still unloading piles of bodies from military trucks late Monday after the tsunami swept several kilometers inland.
In the center of the sprawling city, dozens of bodies were still scattered on streets, while masses of debris -- a mix of mud, ruined trucks and cars, mangled motorcycles, and wood from shattered houses -- had yet to be cleared.
Throughout the region, relatives hunted through piles of dead stacked up in hospital corridors and prayed for the safe return of thousands still missing as the toll rose to about 22,500.
"Death came from the sea," Satya Kumari, a construction worker living on the outskirts of the former French enclave of Pondicherry, India, told Reuters. "The waves just kept chasing us. It swept away all our huts. What did we do to deserve this?"
International aid agencies rushed staff, equipment and money to the region, warning that bodies rotting in the water were already beginning to threaten the water supply for survivors.
Some of the dead were foreign tourists. Among those killed in Sri Lanka were at least nine Japanese who had been watching elephants in a park when the tsunami swept over them.
"This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal areas ... so many vulnerable communities," U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland told CNN.
The Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it was seeking $6.5 million for emergency aid funding.
"The scale of the tragedy is massive. Sri Lanka has never been hit by tidal waves or earthquakes or anything at all in its known history so this is a grave tragedy which we have not been prepared for," President Chandrika Kumaratunga told the BBC.
The tsunami spared no one. Western tourists were killed as they sunbathed on the beach, poor villagers were drowned in their seaside homes and fishermen died in flimsy boats. The 21-year-old grandson of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej was killed on a jet-ski.
ROWS OF DEAD CHILDREN
In Aceh, on northern Sumatra island, volunteers laid children's bodies in rows under sarongs at makeshift morgues. Others were stacked in white fish crates.
"It smells so bad ... The human bodies are mixed in with dead animals like dogs, fish, cats and goats," said marine colonel Buyung Lelana, head of an evacuation team in Aceh searching for more dead.
"I am hoping there are still enough coffins available," said Mustofa, mayor of Aceh's Bireuen regency.
Smaller tremors followed Sunday's earthquake, the world's biggest since 1964 and the fourth-largest since 1900.
Families around the world anxiously sought news of loved ones on Christmas holidays. Calls from worried relatives swamped hotlines set up by foreign ministries and tour operators.
Thailand evacuated injured survivors from its southern beaches Monday.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said it would go much higher. "We have a long way to go in collecting bodies," he told reporters after visiting Phuket, one of Asia's premier beach resorts which draws 3 million foreign tourists a year.
Some hospitals in Phuket began releasing informal, hand-written lists of the dead and injured in their care. Many foreigners were labeled "nationality unknown."
On Phuket's Patong beach, hotels and restaurants were wrecked and speed boats were rammed into buildings. Belgian tourist Christian Patouraux said he narrowly escaped the wave as he vacationed on the island of Kho Phi Phi, famed as the site of the Leonardo DiCaprio film "The Beach."
"I saw lots of dead bodies and many injured people, many with cuts and broken bones," he said.
Many foreign tourists were left destitute, all their possessions and passports lost to the waves. British travel agents said charter flights that had been due to carry more tourists to devastated areas would instead fly out empty to evacuate survivors.
Hundreds of thousands in Sri Lanka left homeless and fearing another wave sheltered in temples and schools. The southern port of Galle, famed for its historic fort, had been submerged.
Weeping relatives scrambled over hundreds of bodies piled in a hospital in nearby Karapitiya, shirts or handkerchiefs clutched over their noses against the stench of decaying flesh.
"We are struggling to cope. Bodies are still coming in," said Karapitiya Teaching Hospital administrator Dr H.G. Jayaratne.
DEVASTATED REMOTE ISLES
Among the missing in India were 200 Hindu pilgrims who had gone for a ritual sea bath. Hundreds scattered petals on the water and sacrificed chickens to pray for their loved ones' return.
"We are continuously recovering bodies. We are also seeing wrecked fishing trawlers and boats by the coast," coast guard commandant Navin Chandra Pandey said in New Delhi.
At a graveyard in southern Cuddalore, mass graves were dug using an excavating machine to bury nearly 200 bodies.
"We must have dug some seven or eight pits and buried 25, 30, 35 bodies in each of them," said gravedigger Shekhar.
"We lined up bodies next to each other in two rows and buried them. I've never buried so many in a single day in my life."
One of the most devastated regions was India's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, near the quake's epicenter, where officials said the tsunami had killed 3,000 people.
The toll in the strategic islands, mostly barred to visitors and home to several primitive tribes, included at least 68 air force personnel and families at a base, officials said.
In the Maldives, where thousands of foreign visitors were holidaying in the beach paradise, damage appeared to be limited.
The tsunami was so powerful it smashed boats and flooded areas along the east African coast, 3,700 miles away. At least 14 Somalis were killed and nine were missing at sea after turbulent swells generated by the tsunami hit the coast.
A tsunami, a Japanese word that translates as "harbor wave," is usually caused by a sudden rise or fall of part of the earth's crust under or near the ocean.
It comprises a series of waves that can travel across the ocean at speeds of over 500 mph. As the tsunami enters the shallows of coastlines in its path, its velocity slows but its height increases and it can strike with devastating force.
© Reuters 2004
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