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GALLE, Dec 28: The sea and wreckage of coastal towns all around the Indian Ocean yielded up tens of thousands of bodies on Tuesday, pushing the toll from Sunday's tsunami past 60,000.
The apocalyptic destruction caused by the wave dwarfed the efforts of governments and relief agencies as they turned from rescuing survivors to trying to care for millions of homeless, increasingly threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses.
"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.
Sri Lanka and Indonesia each reported death tolls around 19,000 and expected them to keep rising. India's toll of 11,500 included at least 7,000 on one archipelago, the Andamans and Nicobar. On one island, the surge of water triggered by Sunday's cataclysmic undersea earthquake killed two-thirds of the population.
The chasm that it tore in the seabed off the Indonesian island of Sumatra launched a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas tourists in Thailand.
The surge battered thousands of miles of coastline in a vast arc from Indonesia to Tanzania. Fishing villages, ports and resorts were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed.
FIELD OF DEATH: In northern Indonesia's remote Aceh region, closest to the epicentre, bodies littered the streets. About 1,000 people lay on a sports field where they were killed when the three-storey-high wall of water struck.
Miles of shattered hotels along Thailand's Khao Lak beach, a magnet for Scandinavian and German tourists, began yielding up dead, bloated, gashed and mangled bodies.
The 770 dead so far counted at Khao Lak came from dozens of countries as well as Thailand. Many of the bodies were already decomposing in the heat, underlining the growing health risk.
"Rescuers are holding their breath and using their bare hands, axes, or shovels to dig through piles of wrecked buildings and debris at Khao Lak," said a senior provincial official, Chailert Piyorattanachote.
"We don't have enough coffins and those that we have are too small for the bloated bodies of foreigners." Around the ring of devastation, Sweden reported 1,500 citizens missing, the Czech Republic almost 400, Finland 200 and Italy and Germany 100.
More than 20 countries have pledged emergency aid worth more than $60 million. Several Asian nations have sent naval ships carrying supplies and doctors to devastated areas.
The United Nations said the disaster was unique in encompassing such a large area and so many countries, and would require the biggest and costliest relief effort in its history.
Gerhard Berz, a top risk researcher at Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurer, estimated the economic cost of the devastation at over $13 billion. Jan Egeland, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said:
"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."
MILLIONS HOMELESS: Around Sri Lanka's southern coasts about 1.5 million people - or one in 12 of the population - were homeless, many sheltering in Buddhist temples and schools.
For the most immediate needs, hundreds of relief planes packed with emergency goods were due to arrive in the region from about two dozen countries within the next 48 hours. But authorities waited in trepidation for the outbreak of diseases caused by polluted drinking water and the sheer scale of thousands of putrefying bodies, lying in mud or being washed onto beaches.
The U.N.'s Egeland said there could be epidemics of intestinal and lung infections unless health systems in the stricken countries got help. A top World Health Organisation expert, David Nabarro said there was "certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami".
In Aceh, Lieutenant-Colonel Budi Santoso said: "Many bodies are still lying on the streets. There just aren't enough body bags." "I've never buried so many in a single day in my life," said Shekhar, an Indian gravedigger.
On the island of Chowra in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, not far from the epicentre of Sunday's quake, rescuers found only 500 survivors from 1,500 residents. A hundred air force officers and their families vanished from one island base.
Authorities said at least 7,000 people were confirmed or presumed dead in the group of more than 550 islands. The United Nations' children's fund said Sri Lankan survivors faced an unexpected threat from some of the two million landmines buried there as the result of ethnic conflict.
"Mines were floated by the floods and washed out of known minefields, so now we don't know where they are," UNICEF's Ted Chaiban said in Colombo. "The greatest danger to civilians will come when they begin to return to their homes, not knowing where the mines are." -Reuters
