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"....a wall of water as tall as 12 feet (3.7 meters) some 25 miles (40 kilometers) inland"

This was in the most populous part of the country.

The UN estimates that about 1.5 million people are without housing or cover as a consequence.

All of which is pretty bad as it is, but with that wall of water, and the distance it traveled, in the most densely populated part of the country, the death toll is probably TEN TIMES today's estimate.

Just empty houses ~ frankly, pictures on the ground look like a vast area was raked by large numbers of CAT 5 tornados ~ not just the flood.

Not that I want to start a pool here, or minimize the devastation, but there may not be many people left to aid ~ and I suspect the Burmese army is probably not in good shape either. An enterprising Thai colonel probably ought to see how far he can get before encountering resistance in the area. Bet he can make it to the Iriwaddy estuary.

Just empty houses ~ frankly, pictures on the ground look like a vast area was raked by large numbers of CAT 5 tornados ~ not just the flood.

I used to live in New Orleans (attended Tulane University); I saw what the moving water from the Industrial Canal did to the Lower Ninth Ward in person. The exact thing that came to mind for me too was an F5 tornado. The pictures shown by the media were dramatic, but they didn't quite show just how bad it was- they shot footage as they drove of heaps of rubble where houses had been. But when I first saw it, it was a more or less homogeneous and flat debris field; in some places I could not tell where the streets were. Many of those rubble piles they filmed weren't the collapsed remains of houses— they were the piles of debris made by the bulldozers that had cleared the streets they were driving their news vans down.

The Lower Ninth after the flood— F5 just about sums it up.

Those pics of F5 tornado-esque damage may well be of flood and not wind damage. Moving water is capable of some pretty nasty stuff (I saw cars stuck in two separate old Live Oaks in the Ninth too). And while I'm sure the storm surge driven inland by Nargis wasn't moving as fast as the water from the breach in the Industrial Canal, I'm also sure that waves driven in 130mph winds must be capable of some pretty spectacular damage on their own.