COLOMBO: Nations on the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to Sri Lanka are searching amongst the wreckage of a devastating tsunami for bodies to bury as fears grow the toll will far exceed the 29,000 now reported killed.
Two days after the biggest earthquake in 40 years struck the seabed off Indonesia's Sumatra island, triggering waves up to 10 metres high, officials found more death the further they ventured into outlying areas.
It was feared the final toll could rise above 55,000. A disproportionate number of the dead appeared to be children.
The United Nations said hundreds of relief planes packed with emergency goods would arrive in the region from about two dozen countries within the next 48 hours.
Searchers in Thailand retrieved 770 bodies, both foreign tourists and Thais, along the Khao Lak beach north of Phuket resort island, a disaster official said.
Bodies littered the streets in northern Indonesia, closest to Sunday's magnitude 9.0 earthquake. About 1,000 people lay where they were killed when a tsunami struck as they watched a sports event. "I was in the field as a referee. The waves suddenly came in and I was saved by God - I got caught in the branches of a tree," said Mahmud Azaf, who lost his three children to the tsunami.
Thousands of miles of coastline from Indonesia to Tanzania were battered by deadly waves. Fishing villages were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed.
"This was the worst day in our history," said Sri Lankan businessman Y.P. Wickramsinghe as he picked through the rubble of his sea-front dive shop in the devastated southwestern town of Galle. "I wish I had died. There is no point in living."
The United Nations said the disaster was unique in encompassing such a large area and so many countries.
"The cost of the devastation will be in the billions of dollars," said Jan Egeland, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). "However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone."
Sri Lanka appeared to have been the worst hit with more than 12,200 dead. India reported almost 9,500 killed and Indonesia 5,700. Almost 1,500 people are now known to have died in Thailand, many hundreds of them foreign tourists.
Dozens perished in Malaysia, Myanmar and the Maldives and in far-away Somalia, 3,600 miles to the west of the epicentre, 38 people were killed. At least 10 people were killed in Tanzania.
The death toll was expected to rise. Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the toll in his country could reach 25,000. Sri Lankan officials said 20,000 people might be dead there, and Thai officials expected their toll to reach 2,000.
Indian police said 3,000 people were confirmed dead and 2,000 believed dead in the Andaman and Nicobar island chain, bordering Indonesia and Myanmar. A series of moderate aftershocks have hit the islands.
No word has been heard from several of the islands which were home to thousands, including Great Nicobar.
Among the dead foreigners were at least 13 Norwegians, 12 Britons, 11 Italians, 10 Swedes, nine Japanese and eight Americans. Unconfirmed reports said hundreds of foreign tourists had been killed in resorts in Sri Lanka and Thailand.
In southern Thailand, 770 bodies were found in and near shattered beach hotels at Khao Lak, north of Phuket. "My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a hotel on Khao Lak beach. The hotel had been knocked off its foundations and a few body parts jutted from the wreckage. "I think this is her. I recognize her hand, but I'm not sure," Bejkhajorn said.
Television pictures taken from the air showed bodies tangled in debris littering a beach. Other bodies floated in the sea. In Sri Lanka about 1.5 million people - or 7.5 percent of the population - were homeless, many sheltering in Buddhist temples and schools. Throughout the region, people fearing another wave sheltered in public buildings, schools and on high ground. There was a shortage of clean water and provisions. Those not searching for survivors hastened to bury the dead.
Survivors faced their greatest danger in coming days with the risk putrefying bodies would contaminate drinking water and spread infection. The UN's Egeland said there could be epidemics of intestinal and lung infections unless health systems in the stricken countries got help.
The United Nations would provide emergency aid to 500,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province, a UN official said. UN aid workers got the go-ahead from the government to move staff into the province of about four million people on the northern tip of Sumatra, where a separatist rebellion has simmered since 1976.
Countries on the Pacific Ocean have tsunami warning systems but those on the Indian Ocean, where tsunamis hit about once a century, do not.
December 26's huge waves were tracked by US seismologists who said they had had no way of warning governments in the region.-Reuters
COLOMBO: Nations on the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to Sri Lanka are searching amongst the wreckage of a devastating tsunami for bodies to bury as fears grow the toll will far exceed the 29,000 now reported killed.
