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Sri Lankans shelter in temples, search for relatives

KARAPITIYA: Wailing relatives scrambled over hundreds of bodies piled in a Sri Lankan hospital on Monday, searching for loved ones after a tsunami devastated coastal regions of the paradise island and killed 4,891 people.

Residents of Karapitiya, about three km (two miles) north of the southern port city of Galle, milled in the streets outside the town’s hospital, shirts or handkerchiefs clutched over their noses against the overpowering stench of decaying bodies. “We have got hundreds of dead that we have dealt with,” said one official at the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital. “I don’t know what to do.”

Corpses of hundreds drowned when the tsunami crashed into Sri Lanka early on Sunday lay bloated and disfigured throughout the lobby and corridors of the hospital.

A stream of cars, ambulances and trucks brought more dead and created traffic jams in the town.

The body of a pregnant woman lay in the hospital lobby as hundreds of relatives scrambled over the piles of dead. Nearby, a woman collapsed in grief as she identified a relative. Many of the bodies were of children.

A nurse wept as she picked up the body of a baby.

Outside the hospital, a truck pulled up bringing a pile of ornately carved wooden coffins. Officials said the final death toll could rise much higher because hundreds of people washed out to sea have not yet been accounted for. Giant waves crashed into the island on Sunday morning after a powerful earthquake off distant Indonesia, sending a deluge of seawater into towns and villages, witnesses said. By early on Monday, the death toll had risen to 4,891 with 800,000 displaced.

“We are not well equipped to deal with a disaster of this magnitude because we have never known a disaster like this,” said President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who declared a national disaster and appealed for donor aid while on holiday in Britain. In southern Galle, a major industrial hub that was submerged by a 9-metre (30-foot) wave, some residents spent the night on the roofs of office buildings and the local bus station.

Desperate for aid: Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans sheltered in temples and schools after the worst tsunami in living memory.

“We have plastic sheeting for 25,000 families ... We have plastic mats, we have rope, we have clothes ... cooking utensils,” said Roland Schilling, senior programme officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Colombo. “But what is most important is food, clean water and shelter,” he said. Rescue workers found the bodies of 22 people believed to be Japanese tourists early on Monday. They had been watching elephants and wildlife at a national park.

In the seaside town of Kalutara, holidaymakers staying at a luxury seafront hotel described a 2.5 metre wall of water crashing onto the coast. Many hotels along the southern coastal belt - packed at the height of a bumper tourist season - were flooded.

Aid agencies scrambled to ready supplies of food and clothing to send to the hardest hit areas. Railway tracks were broken, buildings demolished and vehicles tossed around like plastic toys as the flood waters surged.

The neighbouring Maldives holiday island chain was swamped, but the waves were much smaller and just 10 people were feared dead. Tamil Tiger rebels, whose two-decade war for autonomy killed more than 64,000 people, said hundreds of Tamils living in the northern and eastern strongholds had been stranded and thousands more had lost their homes.

Army sentry points in the far north were washed away, and Nordic monitors of a three-year ceasefire were evacuated from their residence near the eastern port of Trincomalee to avoid the floods and plastic landmines that have been uprooted. “The human disaster and the tragedy the survivors face are unprecedented and need immediate and effective humanitarian intervention,” the rebels, placed on a US list of banned terror groups alongside the Al Qaeda militant network, said in a statement.

The tsunami was triggered by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra that was followed by a series of aftershocks stretching north into the Andaman Sea. reuters

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