The death toll from Sunday’s horrific tidal waves topped 58,000 on Tuesday, and officials warned that rotting corpses and a lack of safe drinking water could produce epidemics as deadly as the initial disaster.
Relief organizations struggled to rush supplies to the region, but the scale of the devastation posed logistical difficulties for agencies accustomed to funneling aid into a single country. Sunday’s tsunami affected
12 nations throughout Asia and Africa.
The tidal waves, set off by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, could be the costliest natural disaster in history, having caused “many billions of dollars” of damage, said UN Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is coordinating emergency relief efforts.
Officials worried that improperly buried corpses and fouled water supplies could cause outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, hepatitis-A and dysentery.
The State Department said 12 Americans are known to have died.
As daylight broke Wednesday, three days after the giant waves struck, decomposing bodies still littered city streets and beaches. The air was permeated by their stench.
In Galle, Sri Lanka, officials used a loudspeaker to tell residents to put bodies on the road for collection. Muslim families used cooking utensils and even their bare hands to dig graves. In India, Hindus abandoned their tradition of burning bodies and held mass burials instead.
Amid the death and grief were stories of miraculous survival.
Hannes Bergstroem, a blond 2-year-old Swedish boy found sitting alone on a road in Thailand, was reunited with his uncle, who had seen the boy’s picture on a Web site. The child’s mother was missing, but his father was being treated in a hospital.
But mostly there was misery and anguish.
The UN is overseeing what it described as an unprecedented relief effort, and time is of the essence, as disease and hunger threaten to make a disaster of almost unimaginable proportions even worse.
“We haven’t eaten for two days,” said a 35-year-old optician named Irawan, as he waited at the airport in Banda Aceh. “We have to get out of here.”
Outside, desperate people looted stores. “Where is the assistance?” asked Mirza, a 28-year-old resident.
“There is nothing. All the governments are asleep.”
Rotting corpses lay amid rubble of the city’s buildings.
“Many bodies are still lying in the streets,” Lt. Col. Budi Santoso said. “There just aren’t enough body bags.”
HOWTOHELP
These are just a few of the agencies accepting contributions for assistance:
American Red Cross
P.O. Box 37243 Washington, DC 20013
800-HELP NOW www.redcross.org
CARE
151 Ellis St. NE Atlanta, GA 30303
800-521-CARE www.care.org
Oxfam America
P.O. Box 1211 Albert Lea, MN 56007-1211
800-77-OXFAM www.oxfamamerica.org
US Fund for UNICEF
333 E. 38th St. New York, NY 10016
800-4-UNICEF www.unicefusa.org
