Posted on 12/26/2004 8:57:28 PM PST by TexKat
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Legions of rescuers spread across Asia Monday after an earthquake of epic power struck deep beneath the Indian Ocean, unleashing 20-foot tidal waves that ravaged coasts across thousands of miles and killed more than 13,340 people and left millions homeless in the fourth-largest temblor in a century.
The death toll along the southern coast of Asia — and as far west as Somalia, on the African coast, where nine people were reported lost — steadily increased as authorities sorted out a far-flung disaster caused by Sunday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake, strongest in 40 years.
Signs of the carnage were everywhere: Dozens of bodies still clad in swimming trunks lined beaches in Thailand. Villagers in Indonesia picked through the debris of destroyed houses amid the smell of rotting corpses. Hundreds of prisoners escaped a coastal jail in Sri Lanka.
More than one million people were driven from their homes in Indonesia alone, and rescuers there on Monday combed seaside villages for survivors. The Indian air force used helicopters to rush food and medicine to stricken seashore areas.
Another million were driven from their homes in Sri Lanka where some 25,000 soldiers and 10 air force helicopters were deployed in relief and rescue efforts, authorities said.
At Thailand's beach resorts, packed with Europeans fleeing the winter cold at the peak of the holiday season, families and friends had tearful reunions Monday after a day of fear that their loved ones had been swept away.
Katri Seppanen, 27, of Helsinki, Finland, walked around barefoot, in her salt water-stained T-shirt and skirt, at the Patong Hospital waiting room where she spent the night with her mother and sister. She had a bandaged cut on her leg.
"The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was — a full moon or what? Then we saw the wave come, and we ran," said a tearful Seppanen, who was on the popular Patong beach with her family. The wave washed over their heads and separated them.
Fifty-eight half-naked and swimming suit-clad corpses lay in rows outside the Patong Hospital emergency room. Three babies under the age of one were among the victims. A photo of one baby was posted on the wall of victims, the little corpse in a nearby refrigerator.
The earthquake hit at 6:58 a.m.; the tsunami came as much as 2 1/2 hours later, without warning, on a morning of crystal blue skies. Sunbathers and snorkelers, cars and cottages, fishing boats and even a lighthouse were swept away.
Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India each reported thousands dead. Deaths were also reported in Malaysia, Maldives and Bangladesh.
"It's an extraordinary calamity of such colossal proportions that the damage has been unprecedented," said Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa of India's Tamil Nadu, a southern state which reported 1,705 dead, many of them strewn along beaches, virtual open-air mortuaries.
"It all seems to have happened in the space of 20 minutes. A massive tidal wave of extreme ferocity ... smashed everything in sight to smithereens," she said.
At least three Americans were among the dead — two in Sri Lanka and one in Thailand, according to State Department spokesman Noel Clay. He said a number of other Americans were injured, but he had no details.
"We're working on ways to help. The United States will be very responsive," Clay said.
John Krueger, 34, of Winter Park, Colorado, described being inside his bungalow Sunday on Khao Luk Beach, north of Phuket, with his wife, Romina Canton, 26, of Rosario, Argentina, when the water filled it and blew it apart.
"The water rushed under the bungalow, brought our floor up and raised us to the ceiling. The water blew out our doors, our windows and the back concrete wall. My wife was swept away with the wall, and I had to bust my way through the roof," Krueger said while waiting to talk to a U.S. Embassy official at Phuket City Hall. "It was like being in a washing machine."
Canton was dragged into the ocean for more than an hour until a wave brought her back to land again, with a broken nose and foot scratches all over her body, Krueger said.
The quake was centered 155 miles south-southeast of Banda Aceh, the capital of Indonesia's Aceh province on Sumatra, and six miles under the Indian Ocean's seabed. The temblor leveled dozens of buildings on Sumatra — and was followed Sunday by at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, ranging in magnitude from almost 6 to 7.3, and one aftershock Monday that hit India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The waves that followed the first massive jolt were far more lethal.
An Associated Press reporter in Aceh province saw bodies wedged in trees as the waters receded. More bodies littered the beaches. Authorities said at least 4,448 were dead in Indonesia; the full impact of the disaster was not known, as communications were cut to the towns most affected.
The waves barreled across the Bay of Bengal, pummeling Sri Lanka, where more than 4,500 were reported killed — at least 3,000 in areas controlled by the government and about 1,500 in regions controlled by rebels, who listed the death toll on their Web site. There was an unconfirmed report of 500 more deaths on another Web site that provided no details. Some 170 children were feared lost in an orphanage. More than a million people were displaced from wrecked villages.
Devinda R. Subasinghe, the Sri Lanka ambassador to the United States, said the extensive damage will make the rescue effort more difficult. "It's going to take time to figure out access to these areas that have been impacted," Subasinghe said Monday in an interview on CNN. Up to 70 percent of the island's coastline was damaged, he said.
There was sporadic, small-scale looting in the towns of Galle and Matara, and authorities said about 200 inmates escaped from a prison, taking advantage of the chaos after guards panicked and fled when water entered the building.
About 2,300 were reported dead along the southern coasts of India. The private Aaj Tak television channel put the death toll there at up to 3,300, but the report could not be confirmed. At least 431 in Thailand, 48 in Malaysia and 32 in the Maldives, a string of coral islands off the southwestern coast of India. At least two died in Bangladesh — children who drowned as a boat with about 15 tourists capsized in high waves.
In India's Andhra Pradesh state, at least 32 Hindu devotees were drowned when they went into the sea for a religious ceremony to mark the full moon. Among them were 15 children. On Monday, bodies of women and children lay strewn on the sand.
"I was shocked to see innumerable fishing boats flying on the shoulder of the waves, going back and forth into the sea, as if made of paper," said P. Ramanamurthy, 40, of that state.
In Cuddalore, in the worst-hit Tamil Nadu state, survivors huddled Monday in a marriage hall turned makeshift shelter, as fire engine sirens whined outside. Broken boats law on the shore near smashed huts with only frail bamboo frames jutting out of the ground.
The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest since a 9.2 temblor hit Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1964, according to geophysicist Julie Martinez of the U.S. Geological Survey.
"All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute. Speaking on SKY TG24 TV, Boschi said the quake even disturbed the Earth's rotation.
The quake occurred at a place where several huge geological plates push against each other with massive force. The survey said a 620-mile section along the boundary of the plates shifted, motion that triggered the sudden displacement of a huge volume of water.
Scientists said the death toll might have been reduced if India and Sri Lanka had been part of an international warning system designed to advise coastal communities that a potentially killer wave was approaching. Although Thailand is part of the system, the west coast of its southern peninsula does not have the system's wave sensors mounted on ocean buoys.
As it was, there was no warning. Gemunu Amarasinghe, an AP photographer in Sri Lanka, said he saw young boys rushing to catch fish that had been scattered on the beach by the first wave.
"But soon afterward, the devastating second series of waves came," he said. He climbed onto the roof of his car, but "In a few minutes my jeep was under water. The roof collapsed.
"I joined masses of people in escaping to high land. Some carried their dead and injured loved ones. Some of the dead were eventually placed at roadside, and covered with sarongs. Others walked past dazed, asking if anyone had seen their family members."
Michael Dobbs, a reporter for The Washington Post, was swimming around a tiny island off a Sri Lankan beach at about 9:15 a.m. when his brother called out that something strange was happening with the sea.
Then, within minutes, "the beach and the area behind it had become an inland sea, rushing over the road and pouring into the flimsy houses on the other side. The speed with which it all happened seemed like a scene from the Bible — a natural phenomenon unlike anything I had experienced before," he wrote on the Post's Web site.
Dobbs weathered the wave, but then found himself struggling to keep from being swept away when the floodwaters receded.
The international airport was closed in the Maldives after a tidal wave that left 51 people missing in addition to the 32 dead.
Indonesia, a country of 17,000 islands, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on the margins of tectonic plates that make up the so-called the "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Ocean basin.
The Indonesian quake struck just three days after an 8.1 quake along the ocean floor between Australia and Antarctica caused buildings to shake hundreds of miles away. The earlier temblor caused no serious damage or injury.
Quakes reaching a magnitude 8 are very rare. A quake registering magnitude 8 rocked Japan's northern island of Hokkaido on Sept. 25, 2003, injuring nearly 600 people. An 8.4 magnitude tremor that struck off Peru on June 23, 2001, killed 74.
An aftershock measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale has rattled India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, following the tsunami that is feared to have killed at least 7,000 people on the archipelago.
The New Delhi-based Indian Meteorological Department says about eight other aftershocks also hit the tropical island, all below magnitude 5.
The area is close to the epicentre of the magnitude 9 earthquake off Indonesia on Sunday that sent massive waves crashing across the Indian Ocean.
An aftershock of 6 was later recorded in the Andamans.
Witnesses say the sea tide has risen again in the cluster of islands, reviving fears among residents and tourists.
The Andamans lie 1200 kilometres from mainland India.
from Associated Press on Thursday, December 30, 2004
Article ID: D158452
Earthquakes rocked parts of Myanmar and northern Thailand - both countries hit by deadly tsunamis - early on Thursday, Thai authorities said. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
In a statement, the Thai Meteorological Department said a 5.4 magnitude quake just after 8 am (0100 GMT) was quickly followed by a 5.6 magnitude temblor centred under Myanmar.
The effects could be felt in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where buildings were swaying, the department said.
A magnitude 5 quake can cause considerable damage in built-up areas.
Thailand is struggling to deal with the death and destruction wreaked by Sunday's tsunamis on its southern tourist regions where 1,975 people are confirmed dead - many of them tourists. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said early on Thursday that most of the 6,000 people listed as missing likely also are dead.
Myanmar has listed 90 people as killed along its coast line by the tsunamis triggered by a huge magnitude-9.0 quake under the sea near the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Tens of thousands of Indians fled in panic from coastal areas devastated by killer tsunamis after the authorities sounded a new alert, while aid workers struggled to bring relief to the living.
The defence and home ministries issued the warning to evacuate two kilometres (1.2 miles) inland after a new quake shook Indonesia.
Screaming people rushed inland on foot, buses and any mode of transport they could find in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and in Port Blair, capital of the remote Andaman islands, witnesses and correspondents said.
The giant waves killed over 80,000 people across Asia, at least 10,850 of them in India. Thousands more are missing.
Civilians, aid workers and police joined the rush along the Tamil Nadu coast, the mainland's worst-hit state, where officials told people to pull back from the shore.
"Run, the waves are coming," shouted a policeman in Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, while Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa, who was due to visit the fishing hamlet of Akkaraipettai, abandoned her trip.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, due to tour the devastated areas by road, instead used a helicopter, officials said.
By mid-afternoon, the entire historic church town of Valainkani in Tamil Nadu was deserted as even police were seen leaving their post and heading inland, an AFP correspondent said.
In Port Blair, the lieutenant governor and his family dashed for higher ground in their official cars, accompanied by a wail of sirens.
Officials said that apart from a few isolated areas, virtually the entire coastline of Kerala state was deserted Thursday, local officials said.
Most people in the affected areas had in any case sought refuge on higher ground inland after Sunday's disaster.
Home Minister Shrivaj Patil justified the alert, which came despite assurances from meteorologists that the quake in Indonesia, which measured 5.2 on the Richter scale, was not big enough to cause tidal waves.
"We got information that a quake of about 7.5 on the Richter sale could happen," said Patil. "If that happens, collectors (senior administrators) and other officials should take precautions. We cannot say definitely whether it will happen but precautions should be taken."
An embarrassing picture emerged in the media Thursday of how India's bureaucracy bungled the first alerts of Sunday's tsunami, losing precious time that might have saved lives.
India's air force was warned that a remote base on Car Nicobar islands had been flooded well before the giant waves hit the mainland coast hundreds of kilometers away on Sunday morning, the Indian Express said.
On the civilian side, the Meteorological Department sent a warning fax out to the former science minister and not to the incumbent.
The warnings to pull back from the coast came as furious efforts got underway to dispose of decomposing corpses in the tropical heat in view of epidemic fears, with workers fumigating roads.
The stench of death hung over beaches and villages reduced to a mess of debris. Some boats flung from beaches lay atop flattened dwellings.
Volunteers appealed for fuel to burn bodies. "We need kerosene to burn the corpses," said Premananda, a Hindu social group member, in devastated Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu.
"We've dug out 70 bodies, some with our bare hands. We've dumped them in a pit. They should be given a proper funeral but there's no time for it," Premananda said.
Meanwhile, massive aerial reconnaissance was underway Thursday to find people still alive on the isolated chain of the Andamans, home to endangered tribal people and close to the epicentre of the quake which triggered Sunday's killer tsunami.
Thousands are still missing on the islands and on the mainland and many dead remained unrecorded in the race to bury corpses.
"It's now more than four days and (missing) people should be presumed dead," said Vasudeva Rao, police chief of Port Blair, capital of the Andamans, but he declined to put a figure on the number missing.
Helicopters flew over flattened villages on islands near Car Nicobar where 30,000 lived people before the tsunami hit.
Flattend houses are seen from the air in the tsunami-struck city of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, December 31, 2004. Asia's tsunami death toll soared above 125,000 on December 31 as millions struggled to find food and clean water and persistent rumors of new giant waves sent many fleeing inland in panic. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)
Last Updated Fri, 31 Dec 2004 14:31:07 EST
CRAWFORD, TEXAS - The United States dramatically increased its pledge to tsunami victims in southern Asia Friday, raising its contribution from $35 million to $350 million US.
INDEPTH: Disaster in Asia
"Initial findings of American assessment teams on the ground indicate that the need for financial and other assistance will steadily increase in the days and weeks ahead," U.S. President George W. Bush said in statement from his ranch in Crawford, Tex.
Bush also said he would send Secretary of State Colin Powell to coastal areas around the Indian Ocean to assess the damage. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, will accompany Powell.
RELATED STORY: Canada joins U.S.-led relief coalition
The announcement followed criticism the initial contribution was too low for such a wealthy country.
The increased American donation will substantially boost worldwide donations to the relief effort, which United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday had reached $500 million US.
Canada has pledged at least $40 million Cdn to the region, saying Friday it had joined the U.S.-led coalition to co-ordinate relief efforts.
that's alot of tax money...
no surprise...I hear Kofi cut his vaca short...there's money in them there hills Kojo!
Help the victims : Indian sand artist Sudarshan Patnaik completes a sculpture in memory of the victims of the tsunami disaster in Puri some 100 Kms south of the capital of the Indian state of Orissa, Bhubaneshwar. (AFP/Str)
In these satellite images provided by Space Imaging, the coastline of Khao Lak, Thailand is shown before the tsunami attack on Jan. 3, 2003, left, and after the tsunami on right, taken Dec. 29, 2004. (AP Photo/Space Imaging)
In these satellite images provdied by Space Imaging, the Indonesian province of Aceh is shown before the tsunami attack on Jan. 10, 2003, left, and after the devasting tsunami attack on Dec. 29, 2004, right. (AP Photo/Space Imaging)
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