Bangkok--Dec 28--eTurbo news
Over 23,700 people were killed and some 5,200 injured after a tsunami slammed into coasts from India to Indonesia on Sunday following the biggest earthquake in 40 years.
Rescuers scoured land and sea for survivors including missing tourists and fishermen on Monday and fears of disease grew as emergency services struggled with rotting bodies.
Hundreds were buried in mass graves in India while hospitals and morgues in Sri Lanka and Indonesia struggled to cope with injured and bewildered victims and bloated corpses.
"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 Indonesia's Aceh province on the island of Sumatra.
Sri Lanka was hardest hit by the tsunami - a wall of water triggered by the world's biggest earthquake since 1964 with a magnitude of 9.0 that erupted off the northern Indonesian coast.
The death toll in Sri Lanka nearly doubled on Monday to around 11,000 with 200 foreign tourists feared dead. The final toll could be much higher, even double, officials said.
Other areas worst affected by Sunday's tsunami were southern India, where almost 7,000 were listed dead, northern Indonesia with nearly 5,000 drowned and Thailand's devastated southern tourist isles and beaches.
With at least seven Asian nations and one in East Africa counting the human and economic cost of the tragedy, Western nations pledged aid and geologists asked why warning systems that could have saved thousands of lives were not in place.
Struggling with destroyed communications, power outages and swamped and debris-strewn roads, emergency workers were shocked by the sheer scale of the catastrophe.
"We are used to dealing with disasters in one country. But I think something like this spread across many countries and islands is unprecedented," Yvette Stevens, a UN emergency relief official, said in Geneva. "We have not had this before."
The earthquake triggered a tsunami of up to 10 meters high, sometimes traveling as fast as an airliner, 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 Sri Lanka alone, 1.5 million people were homeless and authorities in other countries said vast numbers of people had been displaced and had to search for shelter. Deaths were reported in Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar and Somalia. Smaller tremors followed Sunday's earthquake, the world's fourth-largest since 1900.
Indonesian rescue workers pulled hundreds of bodies from treetops, rivers and wrecked homes in Aceh province, desperate to clean up before disease could spread from rotting bodies polluting water supplies.
Typhoid, diarrhea and hepatitis epidemics now pose the gravest threat to survivors, international relief agencies said.
Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll in Aceh could rise to 10,000. "I am hoping there are still enough coffins available," said Mustofa, mayor of Aceh's Bireuen regency.
Hundreds of Indians scattered flower petals at sea and sacrificed chickens to pray for the safe return of those carried away by the sea as aftershocks hit some areas.
At a hospital in the town of Thazhanguda, a group of women already consoling the mother of one victim broke down when the body of the daughter of another was brought in.
Police say at least 3,000 have died and a similar number are missing in the low-lying Andaman and Nicobar islands close to the quake's epicentre off Sumatra. Coast Guard crews reported flying over hundreds of bodies off India's east coast.
Among those killed in Sri Lanka were nine Japanese tourists who were watching elephants in a park when the tsunami hit.
"The scale of the tragedy is massive . . . this is a grave tragedy which we have not been prepared for," Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga told the BBC.
Weeping relatives scrambled over hundreds of bodies piled in a hospital in the town of Karapitiya, shirts or handkerchiefs held over their noses against the stench of decaying flesh.
Thailand evacuated injured survivors from its southern beaches. Britons, Danes, Swedes, Swiss, Australians, Italians and at least one New Zealander and an American were among the dead on Phuket, where at least 130 people were killed.
It emerged that US officials who detected the quake tried frantically to warn Asia the deadly wall of water was on its way but there was no official regional alert system to contact. afp/reuters
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