Asian Tsunamis Kill at Least 13,340 People

[jamotto]

Link

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By DILIP GANGULY, Associated Press Writer

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Legions of rescuers spread across Asia Monday after an earthquake of epic power struck deep beneath the Indian Ocean, unleashing 20-foot tidal waves that ravaged coasts across thousands of miles and killed more than 13,340 people and left millions homeless in the fourth-largest temblor in a century.

The death toll along the southern coast of Asia ÔÇö and as far west as Somalia, on the African coast, where nine people were reported lost ÔÇö steadily increased as authorities sorted out a far-flung disaster caused by Sunday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake, strongest in 40 years.

Signs of the carnage were everywhere: Dozens of bodies still clad in swimming trunks lined beaches in Thailand. Villagers in Indonesia picked through the debris of destroyed houses amid the smell of rotting corpses. Hundreds of prisoners escaped a coastal jail in Sri Lanka.

More than one million people were driven from their homes in Indonesia alone, and rescuers there on Monday combed seaside villages for survivors. The Indian air force used helicopters to rush food and medicine to stricken seashore areas.

Another million were driven from their homes in Sri Lanka where some 25,000 soldiers and 10 air force helicopters were deployed in relief and rescue efforts, authorities said.

At Thailand's beach resorts, packed with Europeans fleeing the winter cold at the peak of the holiday season, families and friends had tearful reunions Monday after a day of fear that their loved ones had been swept away.

Katri Seppanen, 27, of Helsinki, Finland, walked around barefoot, in her salt water-stained T-shirt and skirt, at the Patong Hospital waiting room where she spent the night with her mother and sister. She had a bandaged cut on her leg.

"The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was ÔÇö a full moon or what? Then we saw the wave come, and we ran," said a tearful Seppanen, who was on the popular Patong beach with her family. The wave washed over their heads and separated them.

Fifty-eight half-naked and swimming suit-clad corpses lay in rows outside the Patong Hospital emergency room. Three babies under the age of one were among the victims. A photo of one baby was posted on the wall of victims, the little corpse in a nearby refrigerator.

The earthquake hit at 6:58 a.m.; the tsunami came as much as 2 1/2 hours later, without warning, on a morning of crystal blue skies. Sunbathers and snorkelers, cars and cottages, fishing boats and even a lighthouse were swept away.

Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India each reported thousands dead. Deaths were also reported in Malaysia, Maldives and Bangladesh.

"It's an extraordinary calamity of such colossal proportions that the damage has been unprecedented," said Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa of India's Tamil Nadu, a southern state which reported 1,705 dead, many of them strewn along beaches, virtual open-air mortuaries.

"It all seems to have happened in the space of 20 minutes. A massive tidal wave of extreme ferocity ... smashed everything in sight to smithereens," she said.

At least three Americans were among the dead ÔÇö two in Sri Lanka and one in Thailand, according to State Department spokesman Noel Clay. He said a number of other Americans were injured, but he had no details.

"We're working on ways to help. The United States will be very responsive," Clay said.

John Krueger, 34, of Winter Park, Colorado, described being inside his bungalow Sunday on Khao Luk Beach, north of Phuket, with his wife, Romina Canton, 26, of Rosario, Argentina, when the water filled it and blew it apart.

"The water rushed under the bungalow, brought our floor up and raised us to the ceiling. The water blew out our doors, our windows and the back concrete wall. My wife was swept away with the wall, and I had to bust my way through the roof," Krueger said while waiting to talk to a U.S. Embassy official at Phuket City Hall. "It was like being in a washing machine."

Canton was dragged into the ocean for more than an hour until a wave brought her back to land again, with a broken nose and foot scratches all over her body, Krueger said.

The quake was centered 155 miles south-southeast of Banda Aceh, the capital of Indonesia's Aceh province on Sumatra, and six miles under the Indian Ocean's seabed. The temblor leveled dozens of buildings on Sumatra ÔÇö and was followed Sunday by at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, ranging in magnitude from almost 6 to 7.3, and one aftershock Monday that hit India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The waves that followed the first massive jolt were far more lethal.

An Associated Press reporter in Aceh province saw bodies wedged in trees as the waters receded. More bodies littered the beaches. Authorities said at least 4,448 were dead in Indonesia; the full impact of the disaster was not known, as communications were cut to the towns most affected.

The waves barreled across the Bay of Bengal, pummeling Sri Lanka, where more than 4,500 were reported killed ÔÇö at least 3,000 in areas controlled by the government and about 1,500 in regions controlled by rebels, who listed the death toll on their Web site. There was an unconfirmed report of 500 more deaths on another Web site that provided no details. Some 170 children were feared lost in an orphanage. More than a million people were displaced from wrecked villages.

Devinda R. Subasinghe, the Sri Lanka ambassador to the United States, said the extensive damage will make the rescue effort more difficult. "It's going to take time to figure out access to these areas that have been impacted," Subasinghe said Monday in an interview on CNN. Up to 70 percent of the island's coastline was damaged, he said.

There was sporadic, small-scale looting in the towns of Galle and Matara, and authorities said about 200 inmates escaped from a prison, taking advantage of the chaos after guards panicked and fled when water entered the building.

About 2,300 were reported dead along the southern coasts of India. The private Aaj Tak television channel put the death toll there at up to 3,300, but the report could not be confirmed. At least 431 in Thailand, 48 in Malaysia and 32 in the Maldives, a string of coral islands off the southwestern coast of India. At least two died in Bangladesh ÔÇö children who drowned as a boat with about 15 tourists capsized in high waves.

In India's Andhra Pradesh state, at least 32 Hindu devotees were drowned when they went into the sea for a religious ceremony to mark the full moon. Among them were 15 children. On Monday, bodies of women and children lay strewn on the sand.

"I was shocked to see innumerable fishing boats flying on the shoulder of the waves, going back and forth into the sea, as if made of paper," said P. Ramanamurthy, 40, of that state.

In Cuddalore, in the worst-hit Tamil Nadu state, survivors huddled Monday in a marriage hall turned makeshift shelter, as fire engine sirens whined outside. Broken boats law on the shore near smashed huts with only frail bamboo frames jutting out of the ground.

The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest since a 9.2 temblor hit Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1964, according to geophysicist Julie Martinez of the U.S. Geological Survey (news - web sites).

"All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute. Speaking on SKY TG24 TV, Boschi said the quake even disturbed the Earth's rotation.

The quake occurred at a place where several huge geological plates push against each other with massive force. The survey said a 620-mile section along the boundary of the plates shifted, motion that triggered the sudden displacement of a huge volume of water.

Scientists said the death toll might have been reduced if India and Sri Lanka had been part of an international warning system designed to advise coastal communities that a potentially killer wave was approaching. Although Thailand is part of the system, the west coast of its southern peninsula does not have the system's wave sensors mounted on ocean buoys.

As it was, there was no warning. Gemunu Amarasinghe, an AP photographer in Sri Lanka, said he saw young boys rushing to catch fish that had been scattered on the beach by the first wave.

"But soon afterward, the devastating second series of waves came," he said. He climbed onto the roof of his car, but "In a few minutes my jeep was under water. The roof collapsed.

"I joined masses of people in escaping to high land. Some carried their dead and injured loved ones. Some of the dead were eventually placed at roadside, and covered with sarongs. Others walked past dazed, asking if anyone had seen their family members."

Michael Dobbs, a reporter for The Washington Post, was swimming around a tiny island off a Sri Lankan beach at about 9:15 a.m. when his brother called out that something strange was happening with the sea.

Then, within minutes, "the beach and the area behind it had become an inland sea, rushing over the road and pouring into the flimsy houses on the other side. The speed with which it all happened seemed like a scene from the Bible ÔÇö a natural phenomenon unlike anything I had experienced before," he wrote on the Post's Web site.

Dobbs weathered the wave, but then found himself struggling to keep from being swept away when the floodwaters receded.

The international airport was closed in the Maldives after a tidal wave that left 51 people missing in addition to the 32 dead.

Indonesia, a country of 17,000 islands, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on the margins of tectonic plates that make up the so-called the "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Ocean basin.

The Indonesian quake struck just three days after an 8.1 quake along the ocean floor between Australia and Antarctica caused buildings to shake hundreds of miles away. The earlier temblor caused no serious damage or injury.

Quakes reaching a magnitude 8 are very rare. A quake registering magnitude 8 rocked Japan's northern island of Hokkaido on Sept. 25, 2003, injuring nearly 600 people. An 8.4 magnitude tremor that struck off Peru on June 23, 2001, killed 74.

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[Eclipse]

Last I heard they updated the death toll to 22k. Very tragic.

[Guest Grayfox]

quote:

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All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute. Speaking on SKY TG24 TV, Boschi said the quake even disturbed the Earth's rotation.

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thats just plain scary right there... probably a precursor though...

[jamotto]

*update*

Climbing Asian Death Toll Passes 23,000

[jamotto]

*update*

Asia Struggles As Death Toll Hits 44,000

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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.

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

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

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

"Is this the fate that we had planned for? My darling, you were the only hope for me," cried one man for his dead girlfriend ÔÇö his university sweetheart ÔÇö as Buddhist monks held prayer nearby.

More than 18,700 people died in Sri Lanka, more than 4,400 in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand, with numbers expected to rise. Scores were also killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives. The giant waves raced nearly 3,000 miles to east Africa, causing deaths in Somalia, Tanzania and Seychelles.

And the toll was expected to continue to mount. A police official said 8,000 people were missing and possibly dead in India's remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located just north of Sumatra. So far, only 90 people were confirmed dead in the archipelago of 30 inhabited islands. The Indonesian vice president estimated that up to 25,000 could be dead on Aceh's western coastlines, bringing the country's potential toll up to 50,000.

Europeans desperately sought relatives missing from holidays in Southeast Asia ÔÇö 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 was reunited with his uncle, who saw the boy's picture on a Web site.

"This is a miracle, the biggest thing that could happen," said the uncle, who identified himself as Jim, after flying from his home country to Thailand to reach Hannes at the hospital were the boy was being treated. The boy's mother and grandmother were missing, while his father and grandfather were reportedly at another hospital.

The vacationing former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was evacuated by Sri Lankan military helicopter from the hotel he was trapped by flooding in the south of the country. In Thailand, Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, who appeared on the cover of 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, was injured and her photographer boyfriend Simon Atlee was missing, Atlee's agent said.

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

Sunday's massive quake of 9.0 magnitude off the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent 500-mph waves surging across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal in the deadliest known tsunami since the one that devastated the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755 and killed an estimated 60,000 people.

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.

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.

Death was so widespread in Sri Lanka that the government waived rules requiring an autopsy before burial. In Muslim villages in the east of the otherwise Buddhist-dominated island, some survivors, lacking shovels, used giant iron forks used for communal cooking and their hands to scrape out graves for several dozen victims, half of them children.

"The toll is going up and I will not be surprised it reaches 20,000 to 25,000," said Nimal Hettiarchchi, director of Sri Lanka's National Disaster Management Center.

Relief workers warned that survivors could face outbreaks of disease, including malaria and cholera. "Our biggest fear at the moment is the shortage of drinking water," said Janaka Gunewardene, a director at Sri Lanka's disaster management center, adding that waterways and well across Sri Lanka's northern, eastern and southern coasts were contaminated, said.

A new danger emerged Tuesday: the floods uprooted land mines in Sri Lanka ÔÇö a nation torn by a decades-old war with Tamil separatists in the north. The mines now threatened aid workers and survivors, UNICEF said.

The first international deliveries of food were being delivered to ravaged areas, as humanitarian agencies ÔÇö accustomed to disasters in one or two countries at time ÔÇö tried to organize to help on an unprecedented geographic scale, across 11 nations.

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.

A dozen trucks loaded with more than 160 tons of rice, lentils and sugar sent by the U.N. World Food Progam, left Tuesday from Colombo for Sri Lanka's southern and eastern coasts, and a second shipment was planned for overnight.

UNICEF officials said about 175 tons of rice arrived in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and six tons of medical supplies were to arrive by Thursday. Helicopters in India rushed medicine to stricken areas. In Sri Lanka, the Health Ministry dispatched 300 physicians to the disaster zone by helicopter.

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[Charles Lindsey]

An animation of the wave. http://cdn.digitalcity.com/newsinteractives2/flash.swf

[Supreme Cmdr]

Wow. Just wow.

[Supreme Cmdr]

Quake's power = million atomic bombs?

Once In A Lifetime: Tsunami Images

Tsunami tops 67,000

American diver underwater during catastrophe (yet another fine achievement by the Bush govt. Typical)

[ 12-29-2004, 07:42 AM: Message edited by: Supreme Cmdr ]

[jamotto]

Group: Bodies Pose No Threat of Outbreaks

[Supreme Cmdr]

Where Are All the Dead Animals? Sri Lanka Asks

[Guest]

The death toll has now risen to above 116,000, and they say it may double with the disease that is probably going to become rampant because of the conditions.

This is not over, not by a long shot....

[jamotto]

Tsunami Toll 125,000, Huge Relief Effort Mobilized

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By Tomi Soetjipto and Dean Yates

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (Reuters) - Asia's tsunami death toll soared above 125,000 on Friday as millions struggled to find food and clean water and the world mobilized for what is shaping up to be the biggest relief effort in history.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites), calling the disaster that has displaced 5 million people "an unprecedented global catastrophe and it requires an unprecedented global response," said a half-billion dollars had been pledged so far.

Aid agencies warned a second wave of death from contagious diseases could wash across Indian Ocean areas devastated by Sunday's tsunami.

Workers in south India sprayed streets to ward off cholera.

"The worst is yet to come, I am afraid, because of the breakdown of sanitation facilities," said Dr. Robert Edelman, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland.

Desperate crowds in Indonesia, their faces coverd with masks or handkerchiefs against disease, besieged aid workers delivering food and clamoured for petrol for their vehicles. Aircraft dropped supplies to nearly obliterated towns in Sumatra, an island the size of Florida.

The tragedy that has touched all corners of the globe is ushering in a somber New Year's Eve. Some 5,000 foreign tourists, mostly Europeans at popular Indian Ocean resorts, are missing and hopes are dimming they will be found alive.

A Red Cross Web site in Geneva to aid anxious relatives locate survivors partially crashed after being overhwhelmed by 650,000 hits in the first 24 hours.

Dozens of aftershocks have unnerved the traumatised survivors after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the strongest in 40 years, sent an unprecedented tsunami rolling from Indonesia to Africa.

After one such aftershock on Thursday, the Indian government issued a tsunami alert that sent residents fleeing in panic and halted aid distribution in towns in Tamil Nadu.

"I don't know how often this (tsunami) will happen but it has suddenly made our lives uncertain," said Apparachi Ashokan, a fisherman at Devanampatti village near Cuddalore town, 170 km (100 miles) south of Madras.

"We have to live here to be able to fish but that would mean risking mine and my family's life," he said as dozens of funeral pyres lit up Tamil Nadu's ruined beaches at dusk on Thursday.

Residents in worst-hit Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra bolted from their homes for a second night in a row after aftershocks late Thursday night.

A tragedy of biblical proportions is bringing together the mostly poor countries along the Indian Ocean rim and their rich counterparts in the West.

People across the world opened their hearts and wallets to give millions of dollars to victims, jamming phone lines and web sites and in some cases outpacing their own governments in their generosity.

The Paris Club group of creditors is to examine a debt moratorium for disaster-struck countries, a source close to the Club said.

President Bush, criticized for a slow reaction to disaster, said he would send a delegation led by Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) to the region on Sunday to assess the need for U.S. assistance. Bush has pledged $35 million so far.

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and a flotilla of ships is steaming to Thailand to set up a base to coordinate aid for the region.

Analysts estimated damages from the disaster at about $14 billion, but that does not include potential losses of business and productivity. Some are cutting economic growth estimates for the hardest-hit countries.

Getting aid to the survivors is the big problem, with many roads washed out, petrol stations not operating and poor coordination among the military, aid groups and governments.

Many villages and resorts from Thailand to Indonesia are now mud-covered rubble, blanketed with the stench of corpses.

Indonesia's Health Ministry said just under 80,000 people had died in the northern Aceh province that was close to the undersea quake, some 28,000 more than previously announced.

Food and medical supplies were stacking up at the airport in the provincial capital Banda Aceh on Friday.

Hundreds of people lined up with Jerry cans at the few working petrol pumps guarded by police with automatic weapons.

"The police are there, otherwise there would be violence," said Zezi Afrizal, 26, a food vendor. "Tell the world we need more fuel."

Only a few trucks could be seen bringing food into town.

Handwritten signs tacked up on utiltity poles and fences across the city pleaded: "Please help. Give us aid."

David Nabarro, head of a World Health Organization crisis team, said as many as 5 million people were now unable to obtain the minimum they needed to live.

Many of them, like Jackson, a 75-year-old farmer on India's remote Nicobar island, are now refugees.

"We are still terrified of the water and the thought of returning to the place where we lost everything," he said at a refugee camp in Port Blair. "But that island is still the only home I know and I would rather go back soon and die peacefully there than live as a refugee."

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[echo]

I got this email today it's a daily thing i get from Arca Max publishing for parents.

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By BOB IVRY, STAFF WRITER

Source: The Record, Bergen County, NJ

The scope of the tsunami disaster defies imagination.

How do we count the dead? There are so many. How do we wrap our minds around the tragedy? It's too big.

The numbers of the dead keep going up. The latest accounting is somewhere north of 100,000 and it's sure to climb. To make matters more grim, the World Health Organization says deaths from disease and deprivation in the wake of the tsunamis will equal or surpass those from the waves themselves.

The number is too big.

And that's not counting the millions with no homes. The villages obliterated. The roads gone. The hospitals, schools, shops and businesses that, in less than a minute, were wiped off the face of the Earth.

"You know how, when there's a car accident in your town and someone dies, we rally around each other?" asks Bob Greenlaw, Ridgewood's director of emergency management. "What do you do here? Everybody's gone.

"We can't imagine it. We have nothing to gauge it against."

"One death is a tragedy," Josef Stalin said. "A million deaths is a statistic."

How do we keep these people, these fishermen, these tourists, these shopkeepers, these hotel clerks, these train riders, these children holding their fathers' hands as they walked along the beach - how do we keep them from disappearing into mere statistics without drifting into despair?

How do we comprehend such enormous loss?

"The short answer is we probably don't. We can't," says Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. "It's too overwhelming. Instead of trying to confront the enormity of 50,000 deaths, try instead to imagine one person dying 50,000 times."

Even that is difficult. Impossible.

We have the luxury of being 10,000 miles away. We did not have our children ripped from our arms and carried out to sea. We did not get slammed against a wall, a tree, a beach and in the process lose our grip on the one thing we loved more than anything in the world.

We are not burying our dead in long, narrow ditches. We are not hunting for food, a dry place to sleep, water that will not poison us, a missing uncle, a face we recognize on a wall crowded with photos of the unidentified dead.

"Turning away from the suffering is a defense mechanism," says the Rev. Raymond Schroth, a Jesuit priest who teaches at St. Peter's College in Jersey City. "It's not what human nature is best capable of. The most fundamental element in human nature is compassion."

Allowing ourselves to feel that compassion, how do we then account for the random nature of death? One minute, you're floating on your back, letting the salty sea buoy you. The next minute, everyone you know is gone.

"It shows the absolute fragility of survival, that our visas as a living person can expire in a heartbeat," says Russell Friedman of the Grief Recovery Institute.

All of us are fragile. All of us exist at the pleasure of mysterious forces. But for fate, a whim of nature, the grace of God, it could have happened to any of us. It's what binds us all, a human family.

"This is a prime example of how small the world really is and how none of us is really insulated from anything," said Anju Bhargava of Livingston, whose sister in India narrowly escaped the wave. "Every continent will be represented, so to speak, by the victims. This is the first major global disaster. I hope - this is my hope - that people see that when it comes to these things, everyone is affected."

So we are all affected. So we search for explanations. We question our assumptions about our own safety. We think about losses we have suffered, and we try to relate them to the losses suffered by the people in South Asia.

We grasp at anything positive to feel a little better.

"At least there's no one to blame for this disaster," says Thomas Frantz, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "It's just nature unfolding. Loss is easier to deal with if you don't have to fight through the anger to get through to the core of the sadness and awe."

Would it have been worse if it were terrorism or an act of war? Would that have made it any harder to bear?

It's true that nature cannot kill humans with the efficiency that humans can. The panorama of the 20th century is littered with examples: Armenia, the Congo, Auschwitz, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bangladesh. In that murderous company, famine and plague, hurricanes and earthquakes are safer bets.

But this is not history. This is here. This is today, and this is tomorrow.

And the children. So many children. How many parents see the photos and watch the videotape and imagine their own little sons and daughters carried out to sea? How many of us see our own young loved ones in the mass graves or in the snapshots of the unclaimed dead?

"They didn't have a chance to live a life," says psychologist Thomas Demaria of South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, N.Y. "We hope that in their little minds they didn't experience any terror or pain before they died."

And the kids who survive - what will their lives be like? Who will take care of them?

"Their innocence about nature is lost," says trauma psychologist Robert Butterworth.

Some of us will inevitably ask: Where is God in all this? How could he let this happen?

"God is in us," Schroth says. "God is working in the world for the victims of the tragedy insofar as we respond, insofar as we see God in the victims. The point of Christmas is that we will learn to discover God not looking up at the heavens or at idols, but seeing him in persons."

"At the interior spiritual level - where was God? - God was drowning with those 50,000 people," Hirschfield says. "But I also know that God is with every relief worker, with every person who sends an article of clothing or writes a check."

This is a horrible thing that happened, more horrible than any one person can imagine. To paraphrase the late author Bernard Malamud, we can never make enough of this tragedy. Somebody has to cry - even if it's us, 10,000 miles away.

_________________________________________________

[jamotto]

*update*

Link

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By CHRIS BRUMMITT, Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the devastation on Indonesia's tsunami-battered Sumatra island Friday as the worst he's ever seen, while authorities there pulled 4,000 new bodies from the rubble, bringing the confirmed overall death toll to nearly 145,000.

Twelve days after the tsunami hit, Annan and World Bank President James Wolfensohn flew over the island's west coast and then drove to the shattered coastal town of Meulaboh, where families picked through piles of rubble six feet high.

"I have never seen such utter destruction mile after mile," a shaken Annan told reporters afterward. "You wonder where are the people? What has happened to them?"

With tens of thousands and still missing and threatened by disease from the Dec. 26 earthquake and killer waves that hit 11 nations, the United Nations said the death toll would keep climbing.

"I think we have to be aware that very, very many of the victims have been swept away and many, many will not reappear," U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said in New York. "The 150,000 dead figure is a very low figure. It will be much bigger."

Hardest hit was Sumatra, which was closest to the 9.0 magnitude quake, and where officials on Friday said they'd uncovered an additional 4,289 bodies ÔÇö mostly in Meulaboh, which had been cut off by washed-out roads ÔÇö raising Indonesia's toll to 98,489. Officials had briefly raised the toll to 113,306 on Friday but scaled it back later, blaming the inaccuracy on poor radio links with remote officials.

Annan's visit came after he attended a summit of world leaders in Jakarta on Thursday on how to turn one of history's largest-ever aid packages ÔÇö nearly $4 billion in pledges ÔÇö into food for the hungry and shelter for the homeless. The U.N. chief urged nations to come up immediately with their promised aid, and to break with past practices of pledging much and delivering little.

Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Sri Lanka, where more than 30,000 people died, to inspect tsunami-devastated areas in the south and hold talks on relief efforts.

"I had a chance to witness the destruction firsthand, and only by seeing it on the ground can you really appreciate what it must have been like on that terrible day," he said. "But I am impressed to see people cleaning up, helping their neighbors."

While some areas in Thailand remained scenes of total devastation, other Thai resorts were looking to the future. Cleanup on several beaches is almost complete and tour operators were eager to get back to business.

"It's amazing how fast things have gone back to normal. The Thais have done a brilliant job of organizing disaster efforts and getting things cleaned up," said Peter Elsey, 48, an English tourist who lives in Singapore and owns a house in Phuket.

In Indonesia, some aid officials were reviewing their security precautions after the arrival of some 80 members of a radical Islamic group. The group, Laskar Mujahidin, accused of taking part in Muslim-Christian fighting in another part of Indonesia between 1999 and 2001, has set up a relief camp ÔÇö but said it was only there to help.

"We are not here to fight, we've come to help. We've got no problem with the foreigners as long as they have no hidden agenda," said group leader Salman Alfarizi.

Indonesian military spokesman Ahmad Yani Basuki said the group was not seen as a threat. "There is no need to keep a special eye on them," he said.

While armed guards have been posted at a U.N. compound in Banda Aceh, officials said they were part of normal security for such a relief operation. But a U.S. official in Aceh said American forces helping the relief effort were aware of Laskar Mujahidin's presence and were keeping a close eye on it.

Analysts said Islamic terrorists known to operate in Indonesia would be foolish to attack anyone helping the tsunami victims, because it could result in aid groups pulling out and sour the militants' chances of building popular support.

India's finance minister, meanwhile, said his country was open to accepting international aid, a departure from the country's long-held stance of refusing outside help.

Minister P. Chidambaram said India is fully capable of providing short-term emergency aid to its citizens but needs help with the more expensive reconstruction stage. Almost 10,000 people died from the floods in India.

Muslims in Banda Aceh performed Friday prayers at the main mosque for the first time since it was used as a morgue in the aftermath of the tsunami, sitting cross-logged on its marble floor as the preacher said the disaster may have been punishment from Allah for "forgetting him and his teachings."

The smell of rotting corpses, thousands of which lie uncollected, wafted through the five-domed Baituraman mosque, which was originally built in 1614. Thousands of troops and volunteers from around Indonesia have been working the past week to clear the rubbish from the grounds.

"We Muslims are gathered here today to show the country and the world that we still exist," preacher Din Syamsuddin told around 2,000 worshippers at the mosque in the city, the capital of Aceh province. "We are sad and we are in mourning, but Allah tells us to be optimistic."

Many of the mosques that are still standing in the staunchly Islamic province on the northern tip of Sumatra Island now function as refugee camps and emergency health clinics. They were the first places many people ran to when the quake hit and monster waves began breaking on nearby beaches.

Elsewhere, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who toured the Thai holiday destination of Phuket on Friday, said 49 Britons were confirmed dead and that 391 were missing and likely dead. He called the effort to identify thousands of bodies one of the biggest international forensic operations in history.

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