BANDA ACEH, Indonesia – Thousands of bodies lay rotting and unidentified on lawns and streets of battered Sumatra island today, and authorities called out bulldozers to dig mass graves as the number killed in Sunday’s mammoth earthquake and tsunami soared above 58,000, with tens of thousands still missing.
The U.N. health agency warned that disease could double the toll.
Across a dozen countries, millions of people whose homes were swept away or wrecked by raging walls of water struggled to find shelter.
“My mother, no word! My sisters, brothers, aunt, uncle, grandmother, no word!” yelled a woman at a makeshift morgue in Lhokseumawe, Indonesia. “Where are they? Where are they? I don’t know where to start looking.”
Along India’s southeastern coast, hospital teams stood by to help the injured, but three days after the disaster were still spending most of their time tabulating the dead as ambulances hauled in bodies. A French cultural center in Thailand’s capital provided clothing and food for tourist families left with nothing when the sea battered southern beach resorts.
One of the most dramatic illustrations of nature’s force came to light Tuesday when reporters reached the scene of a Sri Lankan train carrying beachgoers that was swept into a marsh by a wall of water Sunday, killing at least 802. Eight rust-colored cars lay in deep pools of water in a ravaged palm grove, torn off wheels and baggage scattered among the twisted rails.
“Is this the fate that we had planned for? My darling, you were the only hope for me,” a young man cried for one of the train victims, his university sweetheart, as Buddhist monks prayed nearby.
Indonesia’s Health Ministry said in a statement early today that thousands more bodies had been recovered, raising to more than 30,000 the number of confirmed dead in parts of Sumatra island, the territory closest to the epicenter of the quake that sent tsunami waves rolling across the Indian Ocean. The count did not include a report of thousands more dead in the region around one coastal city.
Sri Lanka listed 21,700 people dead, India 4,491 and Thailand 1,500, with the toll expected to rise. A total of more than 300 were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Somalia, Tanzania, the Seychelles and Kenya.
Officials had not yet counted the dead in two zones that suffered the brunt of both the earthquake and the tsunami that followed: the west coast of Sumatra and India’s remote Andaman and Nicobar archipelagos just north of Sumatra.
Television footage from flights over Meulaboh and other parts of Sumatra’s west coast showed thousands of homes still under water. Refugees fleeing the coast described surviving on coconuts before reaching Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province on Sumatra’s northern tip, which itself was largely flattened by the quake.
“The sea was full of bodies,” said one refugee, Sukardi Kasdi, who sailed a small boat to Banda Aceh to seek help for his family in Surang.
With aid not arriving quickly enough, desperate people in Meulaboh and other towns in Aceh were stealing whatever food they could find, officials said.
“People are looting, but not because they are evil, but they are hungry,” said Red Cross official Irman Rachmat in Banda Aceh.
Bulldozers stood ready today in Banda Aceh to bury the thousands of dead bodies that littered the streets and lined the front lawns of government offices. Officials said they had no choice but to start burying them in mass graves, Col. Achmad Yani Basuki said.
The flooding uprooted land mines in Sri Lanka – torn for years by a civil war – threatening to kill or maim aid workers and survivors attempting to return to what’s left of their homes.
Aid groups struggled to mount what they described as the largest relief operation the world has ever seen, and to head off the threat of cholera and malaria epidemics that could break out where water supplies are polluted with bodies and debris.
Large numbers of corpses themselves pose little, if any, health threat other than the emotional toll that long-unburied bodies may have on survivors. The real danger is from infections already present in the population at low rates that can be spread rapidly in the absence of proper sanitation.
Dr. David Nabarro, head of crisis operations for the World Health Organization, warned that disease could take as many lives as Sunday’s devastation.
“The initial terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer-term suffering of the affected communities,” he said at the U.N. agency’s offices in Geneva.
The first maladies to appear, usually in the first three weeks, are infections that cause profuse, watery diarrhea, which can lead to rapid dehydration and death. Cholera is a classic example. The disease arises when drinking water is contaminated by the feces of people carrying the pathogens.
Somewhat later, usually three weeks or more after a disaster, dysentery illnesses that cause bloody diarrhea and fever appear. They also are caused by intestinal bacteria and are transmitted in fecally contaminated water. Another illness spread by fecally contaminated water is hepatitis A, a liver disease caused by a virus.
Malaria and dengue, two mosquito-borne diseases made more pervasive by standing water and crowding, may also increase, experts said. Vast piles of debris that hold both rainwater and water that came in the inundation give mosquitoes new places to breed.
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