Tsunami death toll approaches 60,000

GALLE, SRI LANKA - The sea and wreckage of coastal towns around the Indian Ocean are yielding up tens of thousands of bodies, 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.

While grieving families in wrecked coastal towns and resorts buried their loved ones, others, including many foreign tourists, looked for friends and relatives still missing.

"Why did you do this to us, God?" wailed an old woman in a devastated fishing village in southern India's Tamil Nadu state. "What did we do to upset you? This is worse than death."

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 army is still bringing out bodies from the rooms, because most of the tourists and staff of the hotel who were there were trapped by the wave which completely swamped this hotel," reporter Anthony Dufour said.

"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. On one island, the surge of water killed two-thirds of the population.

Hundreds of others died in the Maldives, Myanmar and Malaysia. The arc of water struck as far as Somalia and Kenya. Fishing villages, ports and resorts were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed. The United Nations said the cost of the damage will reach billions of dollars.

The tremor, the biggest in 40 years, tore a chasm in the sea bed which launched the tsunami, which appeared to be the deadliest in more than 200 years.

A tsunami at Krakatoa in 1883 killed 36,000 and one in the south China Sea in 1782 40,000, according to the National Geophysical Data Centre in the United States.

In northern Indonesia's remote Aceh region, closest to the epicentre, bodies littered the streets. About 1,000 people lay on a sports field where they were killed when the three-storey-high wall of water struck.

"My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a wrecked hotel on the beach. Body parts jutted from the wreckage.

"I think this is her," he said. "I recognise her hand, but I'm not sure."

At the Thai holiday resort of Phuket, foreign tourists pored over names on hospital lists and peered at 80 hospital photos of swollen, unidentified bodies.

"My father was not there," said German yacht skipper Jerzy Chojnowski, who was looking for his 83-year-old father, missing since the tsunami struck. "My father was not a good swimmer".

Many of the bodies were already decomposing in the heat, underlining the growing health risk.

Relief teams and rescuers flew into the region from around the globe to help in what the United Nations said will be the biggest and costliest relief effort in its history.

Gerhard Berz, a top risk researcher at Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurer, estimated the economic cost of the devastation at over $13 billion.

More than 20 countries have pledged emergency aid worth more than $60 million. Several Asian nations have sent naval ships carrying supplies and doctors to devastated areas.

In Geneva, the WHO's Dr David Nabarro said it was vital to rush medicine and fresh water to the worst-hit countries to prevent further catastrophe.

"There is certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami," Nabarro told a news conference.

There was a serious risk of an explosion of malaria and dengue fever, already endemic in southeast Asia, he said.

Around the ring of devastation, Sweden reported 1,500 citizens missing, the Czech Republic almost 400, Finland 200 and Italy and Germany 100.

Jan Egeland, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said:

"We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages ... that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone."

Around Sri Lanka's southern coasts about 1.5 million people -- or one in 12 of the population -- were homeless, many sheltering in Buddhist temples and schools.

In Aceh, Lieutenant-Colonel Budi Santoso said: "Many bodies are still lying on the streets. There just aren't enough body bags."

On the island of Chowra in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, rescuers found only 500 survivors from 1,500 residents. A hundred air force officers and their families vanished from one island base.

Authorities said at least 7,000 people were confirmed or presumed dead in the group of more than 550 islands.

- REUTERS