[DiSaidSo]

Originally Posted by Servant of Eru

My friend in Malaysia says the Death Toll is now up to 40k. Wow...

Yahoo is reporting 44k. Entire villages wiped out. This is truly a catastrophe.

Tidal Waves Death Toll Rises to 44,000


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 who reached Aceh province at the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, 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. Soldiers and volunteers combed seaside districts and dug into rubble of destroyed houses to seek survivors and retrieve the dead amid unconfirmed reports that other towns along Aceh's west coast had been demolished.


With aid not arriving quick enough, desperate residents in Meulaboh and other towns in Aceh — a region that was unique in that it was struck both by Sunday's massive quake and the killer waves that followed — were turning to looting.


"It is every person for themselves here," district official Tengku Zulkarnain told el-Shinta radio station from the area.


"People are looting, but not because they are evil, but they are hungry," said Red Cross official Irman Rachmat in Banda Aceh.


In Sri Lanka, the toll also mounted significantly. Around 1,000 people were dead or missing and feared dead from a train that was flung off its tracks when the gigantic waves hit. Rescuers pulled 204 bodies from the train's eight carriages — reduced to twisted metal — and cremated or buried them Tuesday next to the railroad track that runs along the coastline.


More than 18,700 people died in Sri Lanka, more than 4,000 in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand, with numbers expected to rise. The Indonesian vice president's estimate that his country's coastlines held up to 25,000 victims would bring the potential toll up to 50,000.


Europeans desperately sought relatives missing from holidays in Southeast Asia — particularly Thailand, where bodies littered the once crowded beach resorts. Near the devastated Similan Beach and Spa Resort, where mostly German tourists were staying, a naked corpse hung suspended from a tree Tuesday as if crucified.


A blond two-year-old Swedish boy, Hannes Bergstroem, found sitting alone on a road in Thailand and taken to a hospital was reunited with his uncle, who saw the boy's picture on the hospital's Web site.


"This is a miracle, the biggest thing that could happen," said the uncle, who identified himself as Jim.


So far, more than 80 Westerners have been confirmed dead across the region — including 11 Americans. But a British consulate official in Thailand warned that hundreds more foreign tourists were likely killed in the country's resorts.


In Sri Lanka, more than 300 people crammed into the Infant Jesus Church at Orrs Hill, located on high ground from their ravaged fishing villages. Families and childres slept on pews and the cement floor.


"We had never seen the sea looking like that. It was like as if a calm sea had suddenly become a raging monster," said one woman, Haalima, recalling the giant wave that swept away her 5-year-old grandson, Adil.


Adil was making sandcastles with his younger sister, Reeze, while Haalima sat in her home Sunday morning. Haalima said the girl ran to her complaining that waves had crushed their castles, then came screams and water entered the home. "When we looked, there was no shore anymore and no Adil," she said.


In Sri Lanka's severely hit town of Galle, officials mounted a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay bodies of the dead on roads for collection and burial. Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, residents took on burial efforts with forks or even bare hands to scrape a final resting place for victims.


The tidal waves and flooding uprooted land mines in war-torn Sri Lanka, threatening to kill or maim aid workers and survivors who are attempting to return to what's left of their homes.





Amid the devastation, however, were some miraculous stories of survival.

In Malaysia, a 20-day-old baby was found alive on a floating mattress. She and her family were later reunited. A Hong Kong couple vacationing in Thailand clung to a mattress for six hours.

The disaster could be history's costliest, with "many billions of dollars" of damage, said U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination.

Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and no health services, he said.

Scores of people were also killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives. The tidal waves traveled as far as Somalia, where hundreds were reported dead, and Seychelles, where three were killed.

Children have emerged as the biggest victims of Sunday's quake-born tidal waves. The U.N. organization estimates at least one-third of the tens of thousands who died were children, said UNICEF (news - web sites) spokesman Alfred Ironside in New York.

Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours after the quake.

But governments insisted they couldn't have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.

For most people around the shores across the region, the only warning Sunday of the disaster came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, sucked away by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a massive wall of water. The waves wiped out villages, lifted cars and boats, yanked children from the arms of parents and swept away beachgoers, scuba divers and fishermen.

The United States dispatched disaster teams and prepared a $15 million aid package to the Asian countries, and the 25-nation European Union (news - web sites) promised to deliver $4 million. Japan, Portugal, China and Russia were sending teams of experts.

Egeland said he expected hundreds of relief airplanes from two dozen countries within the next 48 hours.

Story


The good news is: the world is truly going to work together to help this devastated region. Disasters can bring out the best in people.

[LANMaster]

Truly a shocking tragedy. 44,000 lives lost.
Devastating.

[MightyQueenC]

Death toll from massive tsunami hits 50,000

CTV.ca News Staff

Medical supplies and food aid are pouring into the areas devastated by Sunday's massive tsunami, as the death toll surpassed 50,000 across 11 countries in Asia and Africa.

Millions more are homeless and thousands remain unaccounted for just two days after the deadliest tsunami in 120 years.

Throughout the region, beaches have become makeshift open-air morgues, with weeping survivors scrambling over piles of corpses, looking for missing loved ones. Some are saying the final numbers of dead might never be fully known.

Among the worst hit by Sunday's 9.0 magnitude quake were Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and Thailand. The quake sparked waves measuring six to 10 metres high, and travelled as far as Malaysia and parts of Africa.

As the damage is assessed and the dead counted, the numbers are astounding. Sri Lanka on Tuesday raised its death toll past 18,700, while Indonesia's toll hit 19,000. Although the vice president said it could reach 25,000.

Also hard hit was India, where more than 11,000 people have been confirmed dead by officials.

In Thailand, the death toll nearly doubled Tuesday to more than 1,500 following the discovery of about 700 bodies at a resort near the popular tourist destination of Phuket.

The massive waves also killed people in Malaysia, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Somalia, Tanzania and Kenya.

At least three Canadians have been confirmed dead -- two killed in Thailand and one in Sri Lanka.

Another 60 Canadians are missing, according to Reynald Doiron, a spokesman for Canada's Foreign Affairs Department. About 38 people are unaccounted for or missing in Thailand.

Aid efforts

United Nations emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland says the disaster may be the costliest in history.

He says the tsunami was not the largest ever recorded "but the effects may be the biggest ever because many more people live in exposed areas than ever before."

Egeland, who is also in charge of emergency relief said "an enormous relief effort is on its way."

At least one-third of the reported dead are children, according to UNICEF.

As aid workers scramble to help survivors, there are fears that diseases such as cholera could kill many more. Another danger that has surfaced in Sri Lanka is uprooted land mines, which have been washed out of fields.

But what officials are likely most worried about is the lack of fresh drinking water.

"There is a real concern by authorities that people are resorting to drinking sea water or polluted water," said CTV's Matt McClure, reporting from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The United States prepared a $15 million aid package to the Asian countries, and the 25-nation European Union promised to quickly deliver $4 million. Canada promised $4 million with more likely to come.

Canadians wishing to donate aid to quake relief can call the Red Cross at 1-800-418-1111 or UNICEF at 1-877-955-3111.

http://sympaticomsn.ctv.ca/servlet/A...hub=topstories

[DiSaidSo]

Thanks for the Canadian perspective, MQ. I hope the unaccounted for are found soon.

[MightyQueenC]

Originally Posted by DiSaidSo

Thanks for the Canadian perspective, MQ. I hope the unaccounted for are found soon.

Me too, Di. I really wanted to post the toll free numbers part of it.
Make it easier for people to help... give them a number to dial

[LANMaster]

..... something to consider

Scientist warns of Atlantic tidal wave
Calls for monitoring of key Canary Island volcano

(from Aug 9th, 2004)

LONDON - The bad news is tens of millions of people along the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada may drown if the slow slippage of a volcano off north Africa becomes a cataclysmic collapse.

But the good news is the world is not likely to be destroyed by an asteroid any time soon.

Scientist Bill McGuire told a news conference on natural disasters on Monday that sometime in the next few thousand years the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Island of La Palma will collapse, sending walls of water 100 meters high racing across the Atlantic.

A chunk of the volcano the size of a small island began to slide into the ocean in 1949. There is almost no monitoring of the volcano, giving virtually no chance of any advance warning of another eruption, which could trigger the catastrophe.

"The U.S. government must be aware of the threat. I am sure they are not taking it seriously," McGuire of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre told reporters. "They certainly should be worried, as should the island states of the Caribbean."

He said the giant tidal wave or tsunami triggered by such a collapse would hit the other islands of the Spanish-owned Canaries within an hour and reach the north African coast within two hours.

Between seven and 10 hours later, waves still several tens of meters tall and traveling at the speed of a jet plane would be swamping the Caribbean and crashing into the eastern seaboards of South and North America.

McGuire urged the governments of Spain and the United States to fund monitoring of the volcanically active La Palma — a project he said could be achieved relatively cheaply.

He said the slow collapse — started by an eruption in 1949 — would almost certainly be turned catastrophic by another eruption of the volcano, which erupts every 25 to 200 years.

The last eruption was in 1971, and prior to 1949, the previous eruption was in 1712.

"A future president of the United States must make a call on what to do when La Palma collapses," he said.

On a brighter note, scientist Benny Peiser of John Moores University in Liverpool told the same news conference that the threat of a cataclysmic strike on the earth by a large asteroid was fading rapidly as money was pumped into finding them.

Within 10 to 30 years, all the near-earth asteroids will have been charted. Scientists believe they can find a way to steer an asteroid out of the way of the earth, as long as they have enough warning it is coming.

That leaves the field clear for Hollywood to move on to volcanic eruptions and tsunami for the next generation of apocalyptic movies.

link

[LANMaster]

Turkish news reporting 55,000 and rising.

[DiSaidSo]

I think we might need to prepare ourselves for a six digit death toll.

[LANMaster]

God, I hope not.

I'd sure like to see those numbers falling instead of rising.

Did you hear about the trainload of 500 people who were washed out to sea by the waves? There were no survivors. All 500 perished.

We've seen little video of these waves, but I expect that some places must have witnessed massive structure crushing waves.

I will try to find some appropriate links for donations.

[DiSaidSo]

Originally Posted by LANMaster

God, I hope not.

I'd sure like to see those numbers falling instead of rising.

Did you hear about the trainload of 500 people who were washed out to sea by the waves? There were no survivors. All 500 perished.

We've seen little video of these waves, but I expect that some places must have witnessed massive structure crushing waves.

I will try to find some appropriate links for donations.

I would love to see those numbers fall as they find survivors. But there are so many missing and they're not all alive. This is incomprehensible. Let's hope for some miracles and donate what we can. Thanks for looking for those links.

[LANMaster]

Lanka Page (For Sri Lanka primarily (Seems the hardest hit)

Several area relief org's listed here

AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR OVERSEAS AID also coordinating relief

CNN reporting on relief org. efforts

Normally I would also post a Red Cross link and a United Way link. However, after Sept. 11th I feel I can no longer EVER support those 2 organizations.

Please help all you can, but watch the money flow very carefully. Disasters like this and 9-11 have a way of corrupting even the most respected charities.

Thank you.

[LANMaster]

100 dead in Eastern Africa from the same waves.
They're using bulldozers on Thailand beaches to round up the nearly 2000 dead there. (700 vacationers from Europe dead in Thailand) link

This is the story of 2004, folks. This is major.
Bigger than the war, Bigger than the election.

I heard on the radio last night that the 9.0 earthquake caused buildings in Oklahoma City to sway.

[MightyQueenC]

I think what is upsetting me the most right now out of all this is the indignity.
People being "cleaned up" using bulldozers...families unable to give their loved ones proper funerals.
Oh my... I can't stop the tears from welling up

[LANMaster]

Same here, Carolyn.
This is awful.

[Infidel_Kastro]

It is awful, but necessary. The last thing you want is diseases like cholera being spread because of decaying bodies. Just know that the workers are not being insensitive Carolyn, its just that thye have to look at the greater good, and that erquires hard decisions.
I still can't believe the numbers.
Staggering, almost unfathomable.