I feel so awful reading this and not being able to do anything. My donations just seems so meaningless. I feel for everyone who is dealing with this tragedy. The fear of what is or may be in stored for all is frigthening.
[q]
Asia Struggles with Disaster Aftermath, 50,000 Dead
25 minutes ago Top Stories - Reuters
By David Fox
GALLE, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - The sea and wreckage of coastal towns all around the Indian Ocean yielded up tens of thousands of bodies on Tuesday, pushing the toll from Sunday's tsunami past 50,000.
The apocalyptic destruction caused by the wave dwarfed the efforts of governments and relief agencies as they turned from rescuing survivors to trying to care for millions of homeless, increasingly threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses.
"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."
"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.
Sri Lanka and Indonesia reported death tolls around 19,000 each and expected them to keep rising.
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 triggered by Sunday's cataclysmic undersea earthquake killed two-thirds of the population.
At magnitude 9.0, the tremor was the biggest in 40 years. The chasm that it tore in the seabed off the Indonesian island of Sumatra launched a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas tourists in Thailand.
The surge battered thousands of miles of coastline in a vast arc from Indonesia to Tanzania. Fishing villages, ports and resorts were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed.
FIELD OF DEATH
In northern Indonesia's remote Aceh region, closest to the epicenter, bodies littered the streets. About 1,000 people lay on a sports field where they were killed when the three-story-high wall of water struck.
Mahmud Azaf, a referee, lost his three children.
"I was in the field as a referee. The waves suddenly came in and I was saved by God -- I got caught in the branches of a tree," he said.
Miles of shattered hotels along Thailand's Khao Lak beach, a magnet for Scandinavian and German tourists, began yielding up dead, bloated, gashed and mangled bodies.
The 770 dead so far counted at Khao Lak came from dozens of countries as well as Thailand.
"My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a hotel on the beach that had been knocked off its foundations. "I think this is her. I recognize her hand, but I'm not sure."
Around the ring of devastation, Sweden reported 1,500 citizens missing, the Czech Republic almost 400, Finland 200 and Italy and Germany 100.
The United Nations (news - web sites) said the disaster was unique in encompassing such a large area and so many countries.
"The cost of the devastation will be in the billions of dollars," said Jan Egeland, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
"However, 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."
"This was the worst day in our history," said Sri Lankan Y.P. Wickramsinghe, picking through the rubble of his sea-front dive shop in the port city of Galle, strewn with the wreckage of buses and toppled buildings.
"I wish I had died. There is no point in living."
MILLIONS HOMELESS
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.
For the most immediate needs, hundreds of relief planes packed with emergency goods were due to arrive in the region from about two dozen countries within the next 48 hours.
But authorities waited in trepidation for the outbreak of diseases caused by polluted drinking water and the sheer scale of thousands of putrefying bodies, lying in mud or being washed onto beaches.
The U.N.'s Egeland said there could be epidemics of intestinal and lung infections unless health systems in the stricken countries got help.
"Many bodies are still lying on the streets," said Lieutenant-Colonel Budi Santoso in Aceh. "There just aren't enough body bags."
"I've never buried so many in a single day in my life," said Shekhar, an Indian gravedigger.
On the island of Chowra in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, not far from the epicenter of Sunday's quake, 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.
The United Nations' children's fund said Sri Lankan survivors faced an unexpected threat from some of the 2 million land mines buried there as the result of ethnic conflict.
"Mines were floated by the floods and washed out of known minefields, so now we don't know where they are," UNICEF (news - web sites)'s Ted Chaiban said in Colombo.
"The greatest danger to civilians will come when they begin to return to their homes, not knowing where the mines are." [/Q]
Mother nature sucks.
