Asia in Agony: Death Toll Hits 62,000 Digit
Pakistan Times Foreign Desk

COLOMBO (Sri Lanka): Waiting for immediate shelter and succor for survival, especially in the wake of chilly winter, millions of men, women and children, rendered homeless in diverse vicinities of Asia with a colossal jerk and jolt by Sunday’s quake Tuesday mourned their dear and near ones, swallow-up by Oceanic with an update level of almost 62,000 while rescuers estimated that the digit could increase in days ahead.

The process of counting is still on and the number of causalities is swelling with the passage of every hour, said officials by adding; ‘most of the dwellers in the affected areas are still missing.’

‘We can’t guess about their whereabouts as they have had abode in far-off coastal belt where the communication links have vanished’, they said.

Like most of other domains, mourners in Sri Lanka used their bare hands to dig graves Tuesday while hungry islanders in Indonesia turned to looting in the aftermath of Asia's devastating tsunamis.

Thousands more bodies were found in Indonesia, dramatically increasing the death toll across 11 nations to around 65,000.

Indonesia

Emergency workers who reached Aceh province at the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island found that 12,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry.

Another 10,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said. Soldiers and volunteers combed seaside districts and dug into rubble of destroyed houses to seek survivors and retrieve the dead amid unconfirmed reports that other towns along Aceh's west coast had been demolished.

Without Aid

With aid not arriving quick enough, desperate residents in Meulaboh and other towns in Aceh a region that was unique in that it was struck both by Sunday's massive quake and the killer waves that followed began to loot.

"It is every person for themselves here," district official Tengku Zulkarnain told el-Shinta radio station from the area.

"People are looting, but not because they are evil, but they are hungry," said Red Cross official Irman Rachmat in Banda Aceh, where houses and the city's shopping mall were leveled by the quake.

India

At least 160,000 people have been left homeless in southern India by huge tidal waves at the weekend, the government and aid agencies said Tuesday.

The government said the hardest-hit state of Tamil Nadu had 80,000 homeless while UNICEF said the figure was 100,000.

The homeless in Tamil Nadu and tens of thousands in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Pondicherry and Kerala were receiving survival packs of food, water, clothing and kitchen utensils, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters following a federal cabinet meeting on relief efforts.

"There are certain areas that have been identified as essential requirements in relief operations and they include the distribution of food, drinking water, tents and speedy disposal of decomposing bodies," Mukherjee said.

The far-flung Andaman and Nicobar islands were also receiving supplies in areas reached by military and government officials, but details from the archipelago were scant.

Mukherjee said the death toll in India so far was 4,857, well below state tallies of at least 8,500 dead, nearly half of them on Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Mukherjee said the government death toll in those islands was 167. Tens of thousands of people remained unaccounted for on the archipelago which lies close to the epicentre of the huge earthquake off Indonesia that sent massive waves crashing across the Indian Ocean on Sunday.

Reports from officials on the island said at least 3,000 were killed in the Andaman archipelago 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from mainland India. Naval ships headed for Greater Car Nicobar, its smaller neighbour which was home to more than 45,000 people.

"We plan to send a team and 1,000 survival packs to the Andamans on Wednesday by Jet Airways," Manish Choudhury, director of the Indian Red Cross, said. "But we're a long way from an assessment of needs there."

In addition to the five billion rupees (114 million dollars) provided for relief work Monday by the government, another two billion rupees (46 million dollars) has been earmarked to rebuild rural housing, Mukherjee said.

The Indian Red Cross said it had distributed 5,000 survival packs, kitchen utensils, clothes, food and blankets, in Tamil Nadu on Tuesday. It said it expected demand will rise to 100,000 packs within days.

"We have 400 volunteers working in Tamil Nadu now and help is pouring in," said Choudhry. "We are just looking at basic needs now as there are so many people without a place to go."

UNICEF said the first water tanks dispatched to the area had reached camps set up in Tamil Nadu's popular pilgrim town of Kanchipuram, nearly 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the state capital Madras, on Tuesday.

It added that relief materials including chlorine tablets to purify water, medicines and blankets and cotton sheets had also been dispatched for relief camps.

"These families have urgent needs," said United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) water and sanitation chief Lizette Burgers, after visiting the area.

"I talked to mothers who are desperately searching for their children but cannot afford a bus ticket to visit nearby villages to look for them and I have seen many children who seem traumatized," she added.

"Getting clean water to people in the camps is critical at this point to head off the spread of disease," said Burgers.

"We are closely monitoring the hygiene conditions in the relief areas. Some diarrhoeal cases have already been reported, so providing oral rehydration solution is critical," she said.

No money for tidal wave warning system: India

India repeatedly turned a deaf ear to warnings that it needed to set up a tidal wave alert system, a newspaper reported Tuesday, quoting a leading world expert.

Twenty-six countries were alerted to Sunday's devastating tsunami in 15 minutes, the Indian Express said, but India, where more than 8,500 died, was not one of them.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre and the International Tsunami Information Centre, both in Hawaii, detected the December-26 earthquake off Indonesia that generated the Indian Ocean tsunamis.

But the centres were set up to provide alerts to Pacific nations and frantic scientists had no contacts in the countries in the path of the giant waves. India had decided the cost was too great, Canada-based Indian Tad Murty told the Express.

The daily noted that "such was the level of ignorance (in India) that even the National Institute of Oceanography director Satish R. Shetye only found out more than three hours after disaster struck. "I was completely taken by surprise," he said.

"I have tried several times with the Indian government, but they have said they do not have enough money to sustain a full-fledged system," said Murty, who helped set up the Pacific and Canadian systems three decades ago. "It will be difficult for India to do it alone," admitted Murty, of the University of Winnipeg.

"They should get together with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Thailand and come under the umbrella of the UN to set up this round-the clock warning system," he said.

India's Minister of State for Science and Technology announced Monday that the government had now decided to install a sea floor pressure recording system in the Indian Ocean to send warnings in the event of a tsumani building up.

New Delhi would also join the network of 26 countries which warn each other of any changes in the sea pressure and the possibility of the onset of high tidal waves due to earthquakes, he said.

Australia has now proposed an Indian Ocean tsunami monitoring network to mirror the Honolulu-based system already covering the Pacific.

Japan said it would suggest a similar system at a disaster management conference in Kobe next month, and some Commonwealth countries said they were considering banding together to provide global tsunami warnings.

Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, the toll also mounted significantly. Around 1,000 people were dead or missing from a train that was flung off its tracks when the gigantic waves hit. Rescuers pulled 204 bodies from the train's eight carriages reduced to twisted metal and cremated or buried them Tuesday next to the railroad track that runs along the coast.

"Is this the fate that we had planned for? My darling, you were the only hope for me," cried one man for his dead girlfriend — his university sweetheart — as Buddhist monks held prayer nearby.

More than 19,700 people died in Sri Lanka, more than 7,000 in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand, with numbers expected to rise. Scores were also killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives. The giant waves raced nearly 3,000 miles to east Africa, causing deaths in Somalia, Tanzania and Seychelles. The Indonesian vice president's estimate that his country's coastlines held up to 25,000 victims would bring the potential toll up to 50,000.

Of the Europeans

Europeans desperately sought relatives missing from holidays in Southeast Asia — particularly Thailand, where bodies littered the once crowded beach resorts. Near the devastated Similan Beach and Spa Resort, where mostly German tourists were staying, a naked corpse hung suspended from a tree Tuesday as if crucified.

A blond two-year-old Swedish boy, Hannes Bergstroem, found sitting alone on a road in Thailand was reunited with his uncle, who saw the boy's picture on a Web site.

"This is a miracle, the biggest thing that could happen," said the uncle, who identified himself as Jim, after flying from his home country to Thailand to reach Hannes at the hospital were the boy was being treated. The boy's mother and grandmother were missing, while his father and grandfather were reportedly at another hospital.

The vacationing former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was evacuated by Sri Lankan military helicopter from the hotel he was trapped by flooding in the south of the country. In Thailand, Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, who appeared on the cover of 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, was injured and her photographer boyfriend Simon Atlee was missing, Atlee's agent said.

100 Westerners confirmed Dead

So far, more than 80 Westerners have been confirmed dead across the region — including 11 Americans. But a British consulate official in Thailand warned that hundreds more foreign tourists were likely killed in the country's resorts.

Sunday's massive quake of 9.0 magnitude off the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent 500-mph waves surging across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal in the deadliest known tsunami since the one that devastated the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755 and killed an estimated 60,000 people.

Miraculous Stories

Amid the devastation, however, 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.

In Sri Lanka, more than 300 people crammed into the Infant Jesus Church at Orrs Hill, located on high ground from their ravaged fishing villages. Families and childres slept on pews and the cement floor.

"We had never seen the sea looking like that. It was like as if a calm sea had suddenly become a raging monster," said one woman, Haalima, recalling the giant wave that swept away her 5-year-old grandson, Adil.

Adil was making sandcastles with his younger sister, Reeze, while Haalima sat in her home Sunday morning. Haalima said the girl ran to her complaining that waves had crushed their castles, then came screams and water entered the home. "When we looked, there was no shore anymore and no Adil," she said.

Death was so widespread in Sri Lanka that the government waived rules requiring an autopsy before burial. In Muslim villages in the east of the otherwise Buddhist-dominated island, some survivors, lacking shovels, used giant iron forks used for communal cooking and their hands to scrape out graves for several dozen victims, half of them children.

"The toll is going up and I will not be surprised it reaches 20,000 to 25,000," said Nimal Hettiarchchi, director of Sri Lanka's National Disaster Management Center.

Outbreaks of Disease

Relief workers warned that survivors could face outbreaks of disease, including malaria and cholera. "Our biggest fear at the moment is the shortage of drinking water," said Janaka Gunewardene, a director at Sri Lanka's disaster management center, adding that waterways and well across Sri Lanka's northern, eastern and southern coasts were contaminated, said.

A new danger emerged Tuesday: the floods uprooted land mines in Sri Lanka — a nation torn by a decades-old war with Tamil separatists in the north. The mines now threatened aid workers and survivors, UNICEF said.

The first international deliveries of food were being delivered to ravaged areas, as humanitarian agencies, accustomed to disasters in one or two countries at time tried to organize to help on an unprecedented geographic scale, across 11 nations.

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.

A dozen trucks loaded with more than 160 tons of rice, lentils and sugar sent by the U.N. World Food Progam, left Tuesday from Colombo for Sri Lanka's southern and eastern coasts, and a second shipment was planned for overnight.

UNICEF officials said about 175 tons of rice arrived in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and six tons of medical supplies were to arrive by Thursday. Helicopters in India rushed medicine to stricken areas. In Sri Lanka, the Health Ministry dispatched 300 physicians to the disaster zone by helicopter.●