WASHINGTON – The U.S. government has a message for any Americans traveling or living in the vast region devastated by Sunday’s underwater earthquake and tsunamis: Call home, and do it fast.
Twelve Americans are known to have died in the earthquake or waves that left coastal areas in rubble in a dozen countries from Thailand to Somalia, but hundreds or thousands more may have been in harm’s way. Many may be safe, but there is no sure way to know until authorities find them, or they check in on their own.
“Call your mother,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Wednesday.
No one knows exactly how many Americans were in the affected region, and no one knows how many may really be missing. The State Department set up a command center Sunday to take calls from worried families, friends and would-be travelers. Working around the clock, the center has a running list of 2,000 to 3,000 names of Americans who may be missing.
“There are families calling us all the time, ‘I haven’t heard from my son. It’s been three days,’” Boucher said.
“We shouldn’t assume the worst,” Boucher said. “We have to assume it’s a process that will go on for some time and that just because we have large numbers of Americans that we’re trying to identify and look for doesn’t mean that they’re all in bad straits.”
Although the overall scale of the death and damage is enormous, only portions of each country were affected. Americans traveling or living in parts of South Asia and East Africa that were unscathed may not think to contact relatives or friends at home and let them know they are fine.
“People who know they’re hundreds of miles away from where … the disaster might have occurred need to call home and tell their relatives,” to whom the entire region may seem “only a quarter-inch on the map,” Boucher said.
State Department employees are combing hospitals, morgues and anywhere else Americans might turn up, concentrating on the popular beach resorts of Thailand as well as parts of Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia.
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