Relief workers find devastation in Indonesia

Thursday, December 30, 2004 Posted: 10:10 AM EST (1510 GMT)

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (CNN)—The death toll from Sunday’s tsunamis has jumped sharply to over 116,000 after Indonesia reported nearly 80,000 people were killed in that country alone.

U.N. relief workers arrived in Indonesia’s Aceh province to find devastation in the region closest to the epicenter of the earthquake that spawned the killer tsunamis.

Emergency workers reported that in some parts of Aceh, as many as one in every four citizens was dead.

Scenes of destruction—homes and businesses flattened, buses tossed about like toys, piles of rubble filling the streets—were repeated across the region, as were the scenes of grief—residents and vacationers searching in vain for loved ones, or, at times, finding them in makeshift morgues.

From CNN.com

From correspondents in Rome
December 29, 2004

THE death toll from the massive tsunamis unleashed by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean could reach more than 100,000, the head of Italy’s civil emergency relief services warned today.

“The number of victims is destined to increase over the coming days and I fear that in the end it will be more than 100,000 deaths even if we will never know the exact figure because there is no register of the population in most of the affected countries,” Guido Bertolaso, director of the Italian civil protection unit told reporters.

Italy’s emergency relief services have been charged with coordinating all rescue operations in the region by the European Union, Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said.

Two days after the massive tidal waves ravaged the coastline of eight Asian countries, the death toll has passed 55,000, with 30,000 people still missing. Most of the victims have been in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

By ANDI DJATMIKO, Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia – Mourners in Sri Lanka used their bare hands to dig graves Tuesday while hungry islanders in Indonesia turned to looting in the aftermath of Asia’s devastating tsunamis. Thousands more bodies were found in Indonesia, dramatically increasing the death toll across 11 nations to around 44,000.

Emergency workers found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, in Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra island, the hardest hit region in Indonesia, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry.

Another 9,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said. Along Aceh’s hard-hit western coastline, villages were swamped up to the roofs, still unexplored by soldiers combing the area for survivors and dead. Refugees fleeing the area described surviving for days on little more than coconuts before reaching Banda Aceh.

“The sea was full of bodies,” said Sukardi Kasdi, who reached the capital from his town of Surang.

From Yahoo News

LOS ANGELES, (AFP) – An earthquake that unleashed deadly tidal waves on Asia was so powerful it made the Earth wobble on its axis and permanently altered the regional map, US geophysicists said.

“That earthquake has changed the map,” US Geological Survey expert Ken Hudnut told AFP.

From Yahoo News