Numbers are still coming in from the worst Earthquake in 40 years measuring 8.9 on the Richter Scale. The earthquake generated Tsunami waves reaching 30 feet high. Current death tolls are nearing 9000. Areas affected; Sri Lanka, India, Sumatra, Bang, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and possibly Maldives.
This being peak of the tourist season had many Europeans and Americans as well as tourist from many other countries. In one location over 200 homes were swept to sea.
Yeah a pretty worrying story. Last I heard there were 3000 dead in Sri Lanka alone, nobody knows what the exact situation is in the Maldives and at least 3 provinces in India, 400 dead fisherman, at leadt 4 touroists sept out to sea and mixed stories about a group of cave divers who are either trapped or dead some experts claim that there will be further quakes that will hit around 7 on the scale and others are saying the death toll could finish up at around 6000 so this could end up being the next humanitairn disaster that needs to be dealt with. it was the speed that it happend that shocked everybody and that obvioulsy cost lives. These places are going to need a lot of help from other countries it was on the news that the UK will be heavily involved in helping the countries that used to be part of the commonwealth as we still have strong relations with them ( sort of like a big brother) but everyone that can help should in whatever way they can.
Nearly 10,000 die
as tidal waves
sweep Asia
Magnitude 8.9 temblor triggers walls of water; villages, resorts erased
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 2:53 p.m. ET Dec. 26, 2004JAKARTA, Indonesia - The world’s most powerful earthquake in 40 years struck deep under the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Sumatra on Sunday, triggering tidal waves up to 20 feet high that obliterated villages and seaside resorts in six countries across southern Asia. Nearly 10,000 people were killed in the devastation, and the death toll was expected to rise.
Tourists, fishermen, homes and cars were swept away by walls of water that rolled across the Bay of Bengal, unleashed by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake. The tsunami waves barreled nearly 3,000 miles across the ocean to Africa, where at least nine people were killed in Somalia, witnesses said.
At least 4,185 killed in Indonesia, the country’s health ministry said.
In Sri Lanka, 1,000 miles west of the epicenter, more than 3,000 people were killed, the country’s top police official said; that number, however, does not include the 1,500 deaths reported by rebels who control part of the country.
Elsewhere, about 2,300 were reported dead along the southern coasts of India, at least 289 in Thailand, 42 in Malaysia and two in Bangladesh.
But officials expected the death toll to continue to rise, with hundreds reported missing and all communications cut off to towns in the Indonesian island of Sumatra that were closest to the epicenter. Hundreds of bodies were found on various beaches along India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, and more were expected to be washed in by the sea, officials said.
U.N. sending assistance
The United Nations is sending a disaster assessment and coordination team throughout the Asian region where earthquakes and floods devastated areas of Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and Thailand on Sunday.
“The United Nations stands ready to provide the assistance necessary to meet the needs created by these natural disasters,” U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.
“U.N. disaster assessment and coordination teams are being dispatched through the region to work with governments of affected countries in providing rescue and relief assistance,” he said. He gave no further details.
A “profoundly saddened” Secretary-General Kofi Annan extended his condolences to the people and governments of the affected countries coping with catastrophic losses, Eckhard said.
‘All the planet is vibrating’
The rush of tsunami waves brought sudden disaster to people carrying out their daily activities on the ocean’s edge: Sunbathers on the beaches of the Thai resort of Phuket were washed away; a group of 32 Indians — including 15 children — were killed while taking a ritual Hindu bath to mark the full moon day; fishing boats, with their owners clinging to their sides, were picked up by the waves and tossed away.
“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 U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a magnitude of 8.9. Geophysicist Julie Martinez said it was the world’s fifth-largest since 1900 and the largest since a 9.2 temblor hit Prince William Sound Alaska in 1964.
The epicenter was located 155 miles south-southeast of Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province on Sumatra, and six miles under the seabed of the Indian Ocean. There were at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, ranging in magnitude from almost 6 and 7.3.
Devastation on Sumatra
On Sumatra, the quake destroyed dozens of buildings — but as elsewhere, it was the wall of water that followed that caused the most deaths and devastation.
• ITN: Harrowing account
Dec. 26: ITN reporter John Irvine recounts his personal experience of being caught in a tsunami coming ashore in Thailand.
MSNBC
Tidal waves leveled towns in Aceh province on Sumatra’s northern tip. An Associated Press reporter saw bodies wedged in trees as the waters receded. More bodies littered the beaches.
Health ministry official Els Mangundap said 1,876 people had died across the region, including some 1,400 in the Aceh provincial capital, Banda Aceh. Communications to the town had been cut.
Relatives went through lines of bodies wrapped in blankets and sheets, searching for dead loved ones. Aceh province has long been the center of a violent insurgency against the government.
The worst known death toll so far was in Sri Lanka, where a million people were displaced from wrecked villages. Some 20,000 soldiers were deployed in relief and rescue and to help police maintain law and order. Police chief, Chandra Fernando said at least 3,000 people were dead in areas under government control.
An AP photographer saw two dozen bodies along a four-mile stretch of beach, some of children entangled in the wire mesh used to barricade seaside homes. Other bodies were brought up from the beach, wrapped in sarongs and laid on the road, while rows of men and women lined the roads asking if anyone had seen their relatives.
‘A huge tragedy’
“It is a huge tragedy,” said Lalith Weerathunga, secretary to the Sri Lankan prime minister. “The death toll is going up all the time.” He said the government did not know what was happening in areas of the northeast controlled by Tamil Tiger rebels.
The pro-rebel Web site www.nitharsanam.com reported about 1,500 bodies were brought from various parts of Sri Lanka’s northeast to a hospital in Mullaithivu district, 170 miles northeast of the capital, Colombo.
About 170 children at an orphanage were feared dead after tidal waves pounded it in Mullaithivu, the Web site said.
Karim Khamzin / AP
A street is littered with damaged vehicles and debris after the area was hit by tidal waves at Patong beach in Phuket, Thailand, on Sunday
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No independent confirmation of the report was available, but TamilNet — another pro-rebel Web site — said some guerrilla territory was badly hit. “Many parts ... are still inaccessible and it was difficult to provide damage estimates or death tolls there,” it said.
In India, beaches were turned into virtual open-air mortuaries, with bodies of people caught in the tidal wave being washed ashore.
“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, who lives in Kakinada, a town in Andra Pradesh state.
Resorts not spared
The huge waves struck around breakfast time on the beaches of Thailand’s beach resorts — probably Asia’s most popular holiday destination at this time of year, particularly for Europeans fleeing the winter cold — wiping out bungalows, boats and cars, sweeping away sunbathers and snorkelers, witnesses said.
“Initially we just heard a bang, a really loud bang,” Gerrard Donnelly of Britain, a guest at Phuket island’s Holiday Inn, told Britain’s Sky News. “We initially thought it was a terrorist attack, then the wave came and we just kept running upstairs to get on as high ground as we could.”
FREE VIDEO
• Deadly tidal waves across Asia
Dec. 26: NBC's Ned Colt in Hong Kong talks with MSNBC's Alex Witt about the earthquake that spawned wide-ranging tsunamis, killing more than 9,000 people in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia.
MSNBC
“People that were snorkeling were dragged along the coral and washed up on the beach, and people that were sunbathing got washed into the sea,” said Simon Clark, 29, a photographer from London vacationing on Ngai island.
aka deltacent aka deltater
Life may not be the party I had hoped for.......
But while I'm here I might just as well listen to the music and dance..
23,500 as of this afternoon of which 11 are British and another 200 foreiners missing.
The strength of the quake has been upgraded from 8.9 to a 9.0 which makes it the fourth largest since 1900 it was felt as far away as Somalia were 200 people who lived on the cost have died.
At least the international efforts have begun, Japan has sent in medic teams, Australia has pledged £3 million, the UK is sending teams out to work out the best way of getting in aid and making sure that it goes to the right places, Tony Blis is also apparently phoning other European leadeasr to get them to give support, China has also promised it will give whatever assistance it can, Save the Children, Oxfam, unicef, Red Cross and Christian aid as always are already in the thick of it and helping people thorugh this terrible tragedy.
I suppose the biggest problem in this is just where do you start, who do you help first?
Devastating news. What a horrible thing to happen. Now they have to worry about those who will die from disease due to the lack of sanitation. I hope that the U.N. can get enough supplies to them to help.
GALLE, Sri Lanka - Bodies washed up on tropical beaches and piled up in hospitals Monday, raising fears of disease across a 10-nation arc of destruction left by a monster earthquake and walls of water that killed more than 22,000 people. Thousands were missing and millions homeless.
Humanitarian agencies began what the United Nations (news - web sites) said would become the biggest relief effort the world has ever seen.
The disaster could be the costliest in history as well, with "many billions of dollars" of damage, said U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and no health services, he said.
More than 12,000 people died in Sri Lanka, nearly 5,000 in Indonesia, and 4,000 in India. The International Red Cross, which reported 23,700 deaths, said it was concerned that waterborne diseases like malaria and cholera could add to the toll.
Dazed tourists evacuated the popular island resorts of southern Thailand, where the Thai-American grandson of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej was listed as one of more than 900 people dead. Scores more died in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives. The waves raced 2,800 miles across the Indian Ocean to Africa, killing hundreds of people in Somalia and three in the Seychelles.
Eight Americans were among the dead, and U.S. embassies in the region were trying to track down hundreds more who were unaccounted for.
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.
A large proportion of southern Asia's dead were children — as many as half the victims in Sri Lanka, according to officials there. A bulldozer dug a mass grave in southern India for 150 young boys and girls, as their weeping parents looked on.
"Where are my children?" said 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to Sunday's epicenter. "Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I've lost everything."
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia officials conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours after the quake.
But governments insisted they couldn't have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he would investigate what role his country could play in setting up an Indian Ocean warning system. The head of the British Commonwealth bloc of Britain and its former colonies called for talks on creating a global early warning system for tsunamis.
Egeland said the issue of creating a tsunami warning system would be taken up at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan from Jan. 18-22.
For most people around the shores across the region, the only warning Sunday of the disaster came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, sucked away by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a massive wall of water. The waves wiped out villages, lifted cars and boats, yanked children from the arms of parents and swept away beachgoers, scuba divers and fishermen.
In a scene repeated across the region Monday, relatives wandered hallways lined with bodies, searching for loved ones at the hospital in Sri Lanka's southern town of Galle — one of the worst-affected areas of the hardest-hit nation. People lifted blankets and soaked clothes to look at faces in a stunned hush, broken only occasionally by wails of mourning.
A tractor brought in about 15 corpses of mostly women and children, some wrapped in white plastic sheets, while a Buddhist temple across the street tried to help people find their missing.
"The toll is increasing," said Brig. Daya Ratnayake, a military spokesman. "We are finding more bodies."
Indonesia and Sri Lanka had at least a million people each driven from their homes. Helicopters in India rushed medicine to stricken areas, while warships in Thailand steamed to island resorts to rescue survivors.
In Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra, the streets were filled with overturned cars and the rotting corpses of adults and children. Shopping malls and office buildings lay in rubble, and thousands of homeless families huddled together in mosques and schools. The minaret of the city's 125-year-old mosque leaned precariously.
At least 3,000 people died in the city of 400,000, which was virtually unique in the region in that Banda Aceh was destroyed by the temblor rather than the floodwaters. Officials said Indonesia's death toll could double to 10,000 when the full devastation in Aceh province becomes known.
In Thailand, the government offered free flights for thousands of Western tourists desperate to leave the southern resorts ravaged by the tsunami. Chaos erupted at Phuket airport as hundreds of tourists, many bandaged and brought to the airport in ambulances, tried to board planes for Bangkok.
Bodies were pulled from roadsides, orchards and beaches as Khao Lak resort, where the Swedish tour operator Fritidsresor said 600 Swedes had not been accounted for.
Jimmy Gorman, 30, of Manchester, England, said he saw 15 bodies, including up to five children and a pregnant woman, on Phi Phi island, one of Thailand's most popular destinations for Westerners,
"Disaster. Flattened everything," Gorman said. "There's nothing left of it."
The United States dispatched disaster teams and prepared a $15 million aid package to the Asian countries, and the 25-nation European Union promised to quickly deliver $4 million. Japan, China and Russia were sending teams of experts.
Egeland said he expected hundreds of relief airplanes from two dozen countries within the next 48 hours
Of course thats just my opinion....I could be wrong. (Dennis Miller)
"You might be the toughest little whacker. . .but in my world, you're about as worrisome as a cloudy day." (Dutch Dooley)
My brain is having a tough time wrapping around the enormity of this tragedy.
Where does one begin to help herein this massive area of devastation?
Living in Louisiana we at least have some alarm as to when a Hurricane is beaming down on us as in Ivan, These people had nothing. I just feel so sad for them all and we have to pray for each and every one involved in this and also that means the vast aid groups going in and putting their own lives on the line.
D
aka deltacent aka deltater
Life may not be the party I had hoped for.......
But while I'm here I might just as well listen to the music and dance..
12-26-2004 03:41 PM
