Tsunami death toll soars above 226,000

THE global death toll from the Asian tsunami shot above 226,000 yesterday after Indonesia’s Health Ministry confirmed the deaths of tens of thousands of people previously listed as missing.

The ministry raised the country’s death toll to 166,320. It had previously given a figure of 95,450 while Indonesia’s Ministry of Social Affairs had put the death toll at around 115,000 before it stopped counting.

Dodi Indrasanto, a director at the health ministry’s department of health affairs, said the new death total reflected the latest reports from the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, which were directly in the path of the killer tsunami spawned by a magnitude 9 earthquake the day after Christmas.

The new figure lifted the total global death toll from the tsunami disaster to 226,566, although the number continues to rise as more deaths are reported around the region.

Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, speaking before the health ministry released its latest figures, told a donors’ conference in Jakarta that the true extent of the catastrophe defied description.

“Perhaps we will never know the exact scale of the human casualties,” he said.

Indrasanto said the health ministry report, which had just 6,245 people still listed as missing, had been sent to Yudhoyono late Wednesday.

The ministry’s figures said 617,159 people were still homeless in northern Sumatra more than three weeks after the killer wave struck.

It has emerged that the staggering devastation wrought by the killer waves killed 75% of the population in some parts of Indonesia with the town of Calang losing 90% of its population of 7,300. In some areas, fatality rates topped 75% and 10% of the homes were destroyed, said Kevin Kennedy, a senior official in the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs,.

The town of Calang, for example, lost 90% of its population - or 6,550 people out of the pre-tsunami population of 7,300, he said.

The survivors are in dire need of assistance, he added.

In Sri Lanka, where the death toll was expected to exceed 40,000 people, aid efforts were proceeding smoothly and equitably to areas under government and rebel control. Meanwhile, the earthquake and tsunami that shattered Indonesia’s Aceh province caused damage and losses worth €3.5 billion, the government said yesterday.

The damage bill represents 2.3% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product and 97% of resource-rich Aceh’s GDP, said Minister of National Development Planning Sri Mulyani Indrawati.

Jakarta has said that the disaster won’t stop the government from achieving its 5.5% economic growth target this year.

Governments, international institutions and members of the public from around the world have pledged about e4bn to help all countries hit by the tsunami.