Tsunami death toll soars to 50,000-plus
AAP (December 29, 2004)
Mourners in Sri Lanka have buried their dead with bare hands while displaced and hungry islanders in Indonesia have looted stores following explosive tidal waves that the United Nations said may be history's costliest natural disaster.
The death toll rose to more than 50,000 early Wednesday and officials said they expected it to rise further.
A dozen nations in a band of destruction from Southeast Asia to Africa tallied corpses at tropical beaches, devastated villages and choked hospital morgues - with 10,000 dead found in a single Indonesian town, according to one government agency.
Indonesia's Health Ministry said in a statement early Wednesday that 27,178 people has been killed on Sumatra island, which was closest to the earthquake's epicentre. But the ministry said this figure did not include data from districts on the island's hard-hit western coast, including the town of Meulaboh.
Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry, said late on Tuesday that emergency workers who reached Meulaboh reported 10,000 dead. There was no immediate explanation why the Health Ministry statement did not count the figure given by Sidik.
Thousands of people were missing, and millions remained homeless.
Aid agencies feared malaria and cholera may add to the toll from Sunday's massive quake-sparked waves, and mounted what UN officials said would be the world's biggest relief effort. "This is unprecedented," said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief coordinator of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
But help wasn't arriving fast enough for Indonesia's Sumatra island, where residents turned to looting to find food.
"There is no help, it is each person for themselves here," district official Tengku Zulkarnain told el-Shinta radio from the island's devastated western coast.
In Sri Lanka, the waves had flung a train off its tracks, leaving many of its 1,000 passengers dead or missing, police said Tuesday, as rescuers uncovered thousands of bodies, bringing the island nation's toll to 18,706. The train was called Samudradevi, or Queen of the Sea.
Sunday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake under the Indian Ocean shot concussions of water onto coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia, drowning thousands. Almost a third of the dead were children, the UN children's agency estimated.
More than 4,000 were killed in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand.
National elections were postponed indefinitely in the Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago where 55 were killed.
Desperate foreigners sought kin missing from holidays in Southeast 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.
In Sri Lanka's severely hit town of Galle, officials mounted a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay bodies on roads for collection. Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, residents took on burial efforts with forks or even bare hands to scrape a final resting place for victims.
