MADRAS, 30 December 2004 — Humanitarian aid trickled in from across the world as reeking corpses rotted in the tropical sun from India to Indonesia yesterday and many who escaped death from one of the worst tsunamis in history fought for survival against thirst and disease.
Rescuers scoured remote coastlines around the Indian Ocean for survivors of Sunday’s colossal tsunami triggered by an earthquake that caused an arc of death across Southern Asia and may have made the world wobble on its axis.
“I would not be at all surprised that we will be on 100,000 (deaths) when we know what has happened on the (Indian) Andaman and Nicobar islands,” Peter Rees of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.
The federation currently puts the death toll at 77,828, making it one of the world’s worst natural disasters.
In parts of India’s Tamil Nadu state, officials gave up counting the dead in their hurry to bury them in mass graves.
And even as relief work was in progress, the Bay of Bengal archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar islands was rocked by two more tremors, one measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale at 3.40 p.m. and another measuring 5.1, at 7.20 p.m. Both tremors had their epicenter near Car Nicobar Island, where the Indian Air Force and army bases were wiped out in the tsunami.
The stench of death hung over stricken coastal villages. The United Nations mobilized its biggest relief operation amid fears that cholera and diarrhea could worsen the death toll. The World Health Organization said five million people lacked the essentials of food, water and sanitation to survive.
“There is no food here whatsoever. We need rice. We need petrol. We need medicine,” said Vaiti Usman, an Indonesian woman in Indonesia’s devastated Aceh province where tens of thousands died. “I haven’t eaten in two days.”
In many areas, health experts said the relief operation looked woefully inadequate with shortages of coffins, equipment and medicine, while emergency workers struggled with power outages, destroyed communications and badly damaged roads.
A harrowing race was on for relatives to find loved ones. One Swedish boy on a family holiday to the Thai resort of Phuket was shown in one news photograph clutching a piece of paper. On it was scrawled: “Missing parents and 2 brothers.”
Disease could kill as many people as the tsunami, health experts said as the full extent of the tragedy began to unfold.
“I have lost three brothers, four sisters, and my father is missing,” wept 18-year-old Tamil fisherman Rajan Xavier.
Scandinavia and Germany, fond of Asia as a winter refuge, faced the fact that the tsunami had turned the tropical region into hell for hundreds of friends and loved ones.
More than 2,000 Scandinavians and about 1,000 Germans were still missing yesterday, a full three days after disaster struck. At least 600 Italians were missing.
Primitive tribes on India’s remote Andaman and Nicobar islands were running out of the coconuts they were living on, with whole communities wiped out.
Buddhist monks handed out rice and curry to survivors in Sri Lanka and aircraft dropped food to isolated Indonesian towns.
In Thailand, where thousands of tourists were on Christmas breaks escaping the northern winter, idyllic resorts were turned into graveyards. Near Khao Lak beach, the smell of decaying bodies hung over a Thai Buddhist temple-turned morgue. “We have only cloth to wrap the bodies in and our bare hands and machetes to retrieve the bodies,” Surasit Kantipantukul, a Thai rescuer, said. “We want machinery and boats.”
— With input from agencies
