A Third of the Dead Are Said to Be Children
By SETH MYDANS
OLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Dec. 28 - Survivors of the gigantic undersea
earthquake on Sunday that swallowed coastlines from Indonesia to Africa -
which officials now describe as one of the worst natural disasters in recent
history - recovered bodies on Tuesday, hurriedly arranged for mass burials
and searched for tens of thousands of the missing in countries thousands of
miles apart.
The toll from the disaster - with more than 25,000 dead and many unaccounted
for - came into sharper relief on a day when it seemed increasingly clear
that at least a third of the dead were children, according to estimates by
aid officials.
The International Red Cross and government officials here, as well as those
in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, the Maldives and as far away as
Somalia, warned that with hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the
open without clean drinking water, epidemics of cholera and other waterborne
diseases could take as many lives as the initial waves.
Images from around the region presented a tableau of unrelenting grief.
Fathers and mothers wailed over drowned children. Bodies were arrayed in
long rows in hastily dug trenches. Villagers sat by ruined homes, stunned.
Hotels in some of Thailand's most luxurious resorts were turned into
morgues.
"This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history because it is
affecting so many heavily populated coastal areas," said Jan Egeland, the
emergency relief coordinator for the United Nations, speaking at a news
conference in New York.
"Usually a natural disaster strikes one or two or three countries, not eight
or nine enormous coastlines like they've done here," he added. "Bigger waves
have been recorded. But no wave has affected so many people." Nearly half
the reported deaths were here in Sri Lanka, where estimates jumped Monday to
more than 12,000 killed, and where more than a million people were reported
to have lost their homes.
The realization began to emerge Tuesday that the dead included an
exceptionally high number of children who, aid officials suggested, were
least able to grab onto trees or boats when the deadly waves smashed through
villages and over beaches. Children make up at least half the population of
Asia.
On the western tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the destruction was
doubly fierce, caused by both the earthquake itself 150 miles away and the
tsunamis that followed. The Associated Press reported from the provincial
capital, Banda Aceh, that bloated bodies filled the streets and thousands of
survivors huddled without shelter. The American Consulate in nearby Medan
has received reports that waters around Banda Aceh reached as far as 10
miles inland. The floodwaters reportedly inundated one city hospital,
drowning patients inside.
Some 5,000 people are confirmed dead but that number is expected at least to
double [Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that the Indonesian
government said that the toll had reached 9,000].Indonesia's vice president,
Jusuf Kalla, said he attended a mass burial of 1,500. The area has been
closed to journalists and aid workers because of a civil war, and only a few
local journalists have gotten in.
Mr. Egeland said, "We haven't a clue" as to the number affected in Aceh. He
said it had been impossible to reach contacts there, which he called "a bad
sign."
India reported more than 4,000 dead on the mainland. Hundreds were dead or
missing in the southern resort islands of Thailand, many of them foreign
vacationers.
Mr. Egeland said the big problem now was to coordinate the huge
international aid effort, a particularly daunting challenge given how
widespread the devastation is. He said the total damage would "probably be
many billions of dollars."
"We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless
fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have just been wiped out," he
said. "Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone."
Amateur videotape played on television showed terrifying scenes from several
countries of huge walls of water crashing through palm trees and over the
tops of buildings and roaring up coastal streets with cars and debris
bobbing on the surface.
To backdrops of screams and shouts, people were shown clinging to buildings,
being swept away by the current, running for their lives, weeping, carrying
the injured and cradling dead children.
As the water receded, almost as quickly as it had arrived, bodies were seen
in the branches of trees, and broken cars and houses littered the shores as
if a tornado had struck. Some of the bodies and debris were sucked back out
to sea.
There were fears of thousands more deaths on India's Andaman and Nicobar
Islands, where most communications have been cut off.
"In Andamans and Nicobar Islands, the death toll is over 3,000," said Rana
Mathew, a government spokesman. "The southern islands are the most affected.
No contact with the island of Nancoveri been established as yet. So the
death toll might go up. And thousands of people are missing."
Smaller numbers of deaths were reported in Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar,
Bangladesh and the Seychelles, as well as along the distant African
coastline, particularly Somalia, where entire villages were reported to have
disappeared.
"All of the fishermen who went to sea haven't come back," said Yusuf Ismail,
a spokesman for the president.
In Thailand, the government said 918 people had died, 7,396 were injured and
thousands were missing, mostly on small resort islands or among boatloads of
recreational divers who had headed out to sea in the morning before the wave
struck.
"I would say the death toll would definitely exceed 1,000," Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra said after visiting Phuket Island, the most prominent of
Thailand's beach resorts, where the death toll stood at 130. "We have a long
way to go in collecting bodies."
Many of those killed there were foreigners, but the most prominent of the
dead was Poom Jensen, 21, the Thai-American grandson of King Bhumipol
Adulyadej.
The smaller island of Phi Phi Lei, which was the scene of the movie "The
Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was reported to have been mostly
leveled. On another small island, the proprietors of the elite Phra Thong
Resort said only 70 of 170 guests were accounted for.
Apart from the huge death toll, it was the presence of large number of
foreign tourists that distinguished this disaster from the many floods and
typhoons that take a heavy toll in the region every year.
In Sri Lanka, the government said as many as 200 foreign tourists had been
killed. In Thailand, an official estimated that 20 to 30 percent of those
killed had been foreigners. The victims were reported to include people from
Germany, Japan, Italy, Sweden, France, Britain, the United States, Austria,
Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Holland, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey,
Spain and Russia. The number of Americans dead stood at eight, including a
well-known fashion photographer, Fernando Bengoechea.
Those numbers were tiny, though, compared with the devastation suffered by
the mostly poor fishermen, farmers and laborers who populate the low-lying
coasts of these South Asian and Southeast Asian nations.
In Sri Lanka, Susil Premajayantha, a senior minister, said the homes of
about 1.5 million people had been destroyed or damaged. Few have the
resources to resume their lives without help.
He said 890 miles of railway track running south from the capital, Colombo,
had been washed away. Local officials told The Associated Press that some
1,500 passengers had been trapped in railroad cars as an entire train was
caught in the rushing tide and swept away.
At least 400 prisoners were reported to have escaped during the chaos from
two jails in the southern area, and officials offered them an amnesty to
turn themselves in. Across the region, police officers and soldiers
patrolled in an effort to halt looting.
The United States Geological Survey said the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on
Sunday morning was the fourth-largest in a century and the largest in the
world since 1964, when an earthquake measuring 9.2 hit Alaska. A number of
strong aftershocks have followed.
"We have ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors," said
Edy Sulistiadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian military, which is fighting
separatist rebels in the area. "They are mostly retrieving corpses."
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations for this article,
and Wayne Arnold from Lhokseumawe, Indonesia.
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