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Tsunami death toll at 60,000

GALLE: The sea and wreckage of coastal towns around the Indian Ocean yielded up tens of thousands of bodies on Tuesday, pushing the toll from Sunday’s tsunami close to 60,000.

The apocalyptic destruction caused by the ocean surge dwarfed the efforts of governments and relief agencies as they recovered countless corpses while trying to treat survivors and take care of millions of homeless, increasingly threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses. Thousands more were injured.

The United Nations launched what it called an unprecedented relief effort to assist nations hit by a devastating tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

In a further threat to the region, disease could kill as many people as those killed by the wall of water, a top World Health Organisation (WHO) official said.

In Thailand, where thousands of tourists were enjoying a Christmas break to escape the northern winter, many of the country’s paradise resorts were turned into graveyards.

In a French-run hotel at Khao Lak on the Thai mainland north of the island of Phuket, up to half the 415 guests were believed killed. A reporter from France’s Europe 1 radio said many bodies had been found in their rooms.

“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.

In Sri Lanka, hundreds of people were killed when the wave crashed into a train, wrecking eight carriages and uprooting the track it was travelling on. The train was called “Sea Queen”.

Of the overall death toll so far of 59,186, Indonesia has suffered the biggest number of victims, with its Health Ministry reporting 27,174 dead while Sri Lanka reported around 19,000.

India’s toll of 11,500 included at least 7,000 on one archipelago, the Andamans and Nicobar. agencies

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