Posted on 12/28/2004 9:09:32 AM PST by Smogger
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) - Mourners in Sri Lanka buried their dead with bare hands Tuesday while displaced and hungry islanders in Indonesia looted stores following explosive tidal waves that the United Nations said may be history's costliest natural disaster.
The death toll rose dramatically to 44,000, and officials 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.
The overall toll Tuesday doubled over the previous day.
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 U.N. officials said would be the world's biggest relief effort.
"This is unprecedented,'' said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief coordinator of the U.N. 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.
Emergency workers who reached the northern tip of Sumatra island found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry.
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 U.N. children's agency estimated.
About 19,000 were killed in Indonesia, more than 4,000 in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand.
Indonesia's vice president estimated his country had as many as 25,000 victims, bringing the potential toll up to 50,000.
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 2-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.
The tidal waves and flooding have uprooted land mines in the war-torn country, threatening to kill or maim aid workers and survivors attempting to return to what's left of their homes.
Sri Lanka's air force evacuated former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl from the hotel where he was stranded in the hard-hit south to Germany's embassy in Colombo.
Kohl, 74, was vacationing and uninjured,
spokesman Ulrich Pohlmann said in Berlin.
Indonesia's Sumatra island was nearest the epicenter of Sunday's monstrous quake - the world's biggest in 40 years - and rescuers there battled to reach isolated coasts and dig into rubble of destroyed houses to seek 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.
Red Cross official Irman Rachmat, also in Banda Aceh, said people on the island were in despair.
"People are looting, but not because they are evil, but they are hungry,'' he said.
"We don't have enough people to bury the dead. We are worried that all the corpses on the streets will lead to disease.''
In once-thriving resorts of southern Thailand, volunteers dragged scores of corpses - including many foreign tourists - from beaches, inland pools and the debris of once-ritzy hotels.
Near Phang Nga province's devastated Similan Beach and Spa Resort, where mostly German tourists were staying, a naked corpse hung suspended from a tree as if crucified.
Amid the devastation 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.
A Hong Kong couple vacationing in Thailand clung to a mattress for six hours.
The 2-year-old infant in Phuket, Hannes Bergstroem, was sitting alone on a road before he was taken to a hospital where his uncle found him after seeing news of the child on the Web.
Reports said the boy's mother was missing, but that his father was at a different hospital.
"This is a miracle, the biggest thing that could happen,'' said the uncle, who identified himself only as Jim.
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.
"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 U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination.
Millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water and a lack of health services, he said.
Scores of people also were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. The waves traveled as far as Somalia, with 100 dead, and Tanzania, with 10.
A handful of deaths also were reported in Seychelles, Bangladesh and Kenya.
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives.
The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late.
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 in the region, the only warning Sunday came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, sucked away by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a massive wall of water.
The waves wiped out villages, lifted cars and boats, yanked children from the arms of parents and swept away beachgoers, scuba divers and fishermen.
The United States dispatched disaster teams and prepared a US$15 million aid package to the Asian countries, and the 25-nation European Union promised to deliver euro3 million (US$4 million).
Japan, Portugal, China and Russia were sending teams of experts.
Egeland said he expected hundreds of relief airplanes from two dozen countries. - AP
And that jerk from the UN had the nerve to call US stingy.
These are just the initial aid packages and I'm sure they will end up much, much higher - with America contributing the most as usual.
Here's the article:
U.N. official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Bush administration yesterday pledged $15 million to Asian nations hit by a tsunami that has killed more than 22,500 people, although the United Nations' humanitarian-aid chief called the donation "stingy."
"The United States, at the president's direction, will be a leading partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery challenges that the world has ever known," said White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy.
But U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.
= = = = =
The UN is really getting on my nerves!
I fear it's going to be well over 100,000 when it's all said and done.
Noticed that too? Why should they pony up, they never have before. Europe has long been dependent on US $. More than just Europe. I think all foreign aid should be redistributed to the countries affected by the tsunami.
QUESTION: How much time passed between the quake and the wave hitting Sri Lanka and India? These countries have telephones, televisions, and internet and NO ONE could say, "Hey, there's been a large earthquake east of us. Maybe we should tell people to get away from the beaches." ?
Their too busy making nuclear missiles.
The long term problems will also kill many more. The fishing fleets in the area were destroyed. Rampant starvation througout the area will be occurring.
This is the 'enlightened' east. They are more in tune with nature and Gaia then us materialistic westerners.
Lemme guess. Mr. Egeland is from a country which has much higher taxes than the U.S. and is one of the 25 EU countries that together pitched in a whopping one fourth of the U.S.' initial donation (which, BTW, was raised today from $15 to $35 million).
The tsunamis hit various major disaster areas from 1 to 2.5 hours after the quake (though the northern part of Indonesia, where the quake's epicenter was, got hit within a few minutes). My big question is about all the educated, wealthy foreigners who continued sunbathing on the beaches and swimming in the sea long after news of the quake had spread around the world. These people are perpetually glued to their cellphones and Blackberries, yet it sounds as if few if any of them put 2 and 2 together and figured out that if one of the biggest quakes in a century had just hit in the middle of the sea that they were on the edge of, they were in huge danger of being wiped out by a tsunami. I seem to recall first getting the quake-tsunami connection burned into my brain in 4th grade.
Even more telling are the people who didn't get the hint after the sea started receding right before the waves hit.
Would you have? Really?
I know enough that if I suddenly see fish flopping where before there was water, that is never a good thing.
I'll give you that ... I just don't know that I would have automatically translated that into RUN NOW!
Sure as heck will now.
At total or at least partial crock. After a 9.0 underseas quake, tsunamis follow. Every government in the area should have put every coastal community under alert. and for that matter, every coastal community mayor or whatever should have done the same thing. And furthermore, every tourist hotel manager should have warned tourists.
I caught the tail end of a Nightline interview with some idiot climatologist from U Hawaii who claimed they had alerted "every country who subscribed to our system but the infrastructure wasn't in place to alert other countries." Words to that effect, anyway, which made me blow my top! The idiots couldn't have picked up a phone? Liberal bureaucrats killed thousands of people, IMO, through their unwillingness to use their common sense.
Meanwhile, an organization I know of personally has an outpost on the beach in Kerala, India. Members contacted them by phone from the US, gave them the head's up, and they saved every one of the 2500 people in their compound, even the pet elephants, which were guided upstairs into a strong building.
Had that conversation yesterday. I had read 2.5 hours to get to Sri Lanka.
Most of those foriegners were from Europe. Or election rigging socialistic Europe. They use modern electronics to converse about the screwed up non-socialistic countries and they also use modern electronics to help brainwash the masses and steal elections. They dont use modern electronics to warn themselves when their god GAIA is upset. If GAIA did get upset, it was probably Bush's fault and there was nothing they could do about it anyway. Therefore, sleeping on the beach is okay.
Doesn't that just say it all... the prevailing thought of the libs.
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