Race to bury dead as toll ticks past 80,000

Confirmed deaths in the massive earthquake and tidal waves that struck Indian Ocean shorelines across 12 nations at the weekend soared past 80,000 as thousands who escaped death in the worst tsunami in recorded history faced a fight for survival against hunger and disease.

The international Red Cross warned that the toll could eventually surpass 100,000 and experts predicted much worse to come as the world's biggest ever relief operation stuttered into life against enormous odds.

Rotting corpses, smashed sewers, contaminated water and a lack of food and shelter, along with mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever and malaria, could wipe out weakened survivors in their tens of thousands, UN and other experts warned.

In Indonesia, a health ministry spokesman said the country's toll was more than 45,000 after it took the full force of Sunday's huge earthquake and sea surges that swallowed entire coastal villages.

In Sri Lanka, at least 22,493, including no fewer than 100 foreigners, were killed by the tidal waves, the president's office said. The death toll in India hit 10,850 with many thousands still unaccounted for, officials said.

More than 1,800 people, among them more than 700 foreign tourists, were killed in southern Thailand, officials said. They feared that many of around 5,000 people still missing were foreign tourists.

In Myanmar, at least 90 people were killed, according to the UN, while 65 people were dead in Malaysia, officials said. At least 65 people including two British holidaymakers were killed in the tourist paradise of the Maldives while another 69 were missing, officials said. In Bangladesh, a father and a child were killed after a tourist boat capsized in large waves.

Fatalities also occurred on the east coast of Africa where 100 fishermen were declared dead in Somalia, 10 in Tanzania, and one in Kenya.

"The immediate terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer term suffering of the affected communities," said David Nabarro, the top official at the World Health Organisation dealing with humanitarian crises.

Food and medicine were already desperately short in many stricken areas.

While the aid organisations made their plans and governments around the world pledged cash and despatched ships and aircraft to help, the millions of bereaved and homeless faced a seemingly hopeless task of rebuilding shattered lives amidst utter chaos.

Half of the confirmed dead -- more than 36,000 -- were in the Indonesian province of Aceh, close to the epicentre of the biggest earthquake in 40 years which sparked the tsunami waves that devastated coastal villages and resorts across the Indian Ocean.

A total of 99 Europeans were reported dead and another 2,811 were missing.

Models, multi-millionare football players, royalty and movie stars were among those sent running for their lives as the sea surged ashore around the region.

But the vast majority of the dead were local inhabitants of the 11 affected countries from Malaysia to Somalia on the African coast, and a large proportion were children, said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children's Fund (Unicef).

"Children can run, but they are less able to hold on, to withstand flooding waters," Bellamy said, warning that children could account for up to a third of the dead.

Survivors told harrowing tales of the moment the tsunami, up to 10 meters (33 feet) high, struck towns and resorts, sucking holidaymakers into the sea, surging through buildings, sweeping cars from roads and smashing a train off its rails.

"The water was just too strong," said Surya Darmar, lying on an army cot outside the emergency ward of a military hospital in Banda Aceh yesterday, covered in cuts and with a broken leg.

"I held my children for as long as I could, but they were swept away."

There were stories of miraculous escapes, such as that of a 13-year-old girl who survived after spending two days clinging to a wooden door in the Indian Ocean after being swept off a remote island.

But there were far more stories of unspeakable horror, with mass burials underway everywhere with little formality but accompanied by huge outpourings of grief from people who had lost their entire families, homes and livelihoods.

In Indonesia's Aceh province, fast emerging as the quake's ground zero, survivors scrabbled for food among mud and corpses. Great tracts of land remain under surging waters and there has been no word from many isolated communities.

The first shipments of international aid were arriving in the city of Banda Aceh, 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) northwest of Jakarta yesterday, but with no trucks or fuel to distribute it, starvation loomed for thousands.

A race was on to reach the isolated northwestern shores of Sumatra where the first contact was made after three days of worrying silence from an area buried by towers of water reaching 10 metres (33 feet) high.

An Indonesian navy warship has brought food and water to the town of Meulaboh, on the western coast, which is more than three-quarters destroyed.

In Nagapattinam, one of the hardest hit areas of India's Tamil Nadu state, four orphans who lost their parents, grandmother and two sisters when the ocean swept away their fishing village, swore they never want to see the sea again.

"I'm scared of the sea," Maghadevi, 13, told AFP. "I never want to see it again. Even if they give me a free house on the beach, I shall not take it."

AID TEAMS ARRIVE
With towns devastated and communications disrupted, the survivors face a struggle for food and fresh water.

Nabarro, of the World Health Organisation, spoke of desperate need for millions left homeless.

"Perhaps as many as five million people are not able to access what they need for living. Either they cannot get water, or their sanitation is inadequate or they cannot get food," he said.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said he would propose a debt moratorium for Indonesia and Somalia among Paris Club members.

The relief operation struggled to get going as health experts said disease could kill as many people as the waves.

SURVIVING ON COCONUTS
In Sri Lanka, where the death toll topped 22,400, Tamil Tiger rebels appealed for help as they dug mass graves to bury thousands of bodies. All 135 children at an orphanage run by women rebels were killed.

Rescue teams headed out to the last of India's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands that have been cut off since Sunday. People on some of the isles have been surviving on coconuts and experts warned some of their indigenous tribes faced extinction.

India's confirmed overall toll of nearly 7,000 is likely to rise sharply. Many of the dead are on the islands, which are closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than to the Indian mainland. On one, the surge of water killed two-thirds of the population.

"One in every five inhabitants in the entire Nicobar group of islands is either dead, injured or missing," a police official said. Dozens of aftershocks above magnitude 5.0 have rocked the islands.

Bloated and decaying bodies continued to wash ashore on the island as hopes of finding survivors amid the rubble of hotels and shops faded slowly.

"It's hard to tell which bodies are foreign because they are just unrecognisable," said French rescue volunteer Serge Barros.

Hundreds of people were killed in the Maldives, Myanmar and Malaysia. The arc of water struck as far away as Somalia and Kenya.

(AP, AFP, Reuters)