Death toll passes 26,000

The Indonesian megaquake may be history’s costliest natural disaster, the United Nations said.

More than 26,000 people were confirmed dead today with some estimates doubling that toll.

Eleven nations in the densely populated band of destruction spanning as far as Africa counted corpses as they filled tropical beaches and choked hospital morgues.

The International Red Cross feared malaria and cholera would add to the toll as aid agencies mounted what UN officials said would be the world’s biggest relief effort.

“This is unprecedented,” said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief co-ordinator of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Almost a third of the dead were children. Thousands of people were missing, and millions homeless.

The Indonesian vice president’s estimate that his country’s coastlines alone held up to 25,000 victims brought the potential toll to 45,000.

Islands way off India’s east coast suffered aftershocks of Sunday’s undersea 9.0-magnitude quake in the Indian Ocean that shot concussions of water onto tropical coasts from Indonesia to Somalia.

In Sri Lanka’s severely hit town of Galle, officials mounted a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay bodies of the dead on roads for collection and burial.

Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, residents took on burial efforts with forks or even bare hands to scrape a final resting place for victims.

About 15,000 people died in Sri Lanka, nearly 6,000 in Indonesia, more than 4,000 in India and more than 1,000 in Thailand, with numbers expected to rise.

Rescue workers battled to reach isolated coasts on the Indonesian island of Sumatra nearest the epicentre of Sunday’s monstrous quake – the world’s biggest in 40 years.

Soldiers and volunteers combed seaside districts and dug into rubble of destroyed houses to seek survivors and retrieve the dead.

“We are working 24 hours to get out people out,” said Red Cross worker Tamin Faisil in Banda Aceh on Sumatra.

In Thailand’s once-thriving resorts, volunteers dragged scores of corpses - including many foreign tourists – from beaches, inland pools and the debris of once-ritzy hotels. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra warned that his country’s toll could double.

The stench of death hung in the air for an 18 mile stretch of beach on Thailand’s southern island of Phuket. Near the devastated Similan Beach and Spa Resort, where mostly German tourists were staying, naked corpse hung suspended from a tree as if crucified.

Amid the devastation, however, were some miraculous stories of survival.

In Malaysia, a 20-day-old baby was found alive on a floating mattress. She and her family were later reunited.

For others, the pain of their loss was almost impossible to come to terms with.

“Where are my children?” asked 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to Sunday’s epicentre. “Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I’ve lost everything.”

The disaster could be history’s costliest, with “many billions of dollars” of damage, said UN Under-secretary 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.

Scores of people were also killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Somalia and Tanzania.

The powerful waves – triggered by the 9.0 magnitude quake off Sumatra – raced 2,800 miles across the Indian Ocean to Africa, wreaking death and destruction as far as Somalia, where hundreds were killed, and the Seychelles, where three died.

It was the deadliest known tsunami since the one caused by the 1883 volcanic eruption at Krakatoa – located off Sumatra’s southern tip – which killed an estimated 36,000 people.

Children have emerged as the biggest victims of Sunday’s quake-born tidal waves – thousands and thousands drowned, battered and washed away by huge walls of water that have decimated an entire generation of Asians.

The UN organisation estimates at least one third of the tens of thousands who died were children, said UNICEF spokesman Alfred Ironside.

Officials in Thailand and Indonesia 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.

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.

Egeland said he expected hundreds of relief aircraft from two dozen countries within the next 48 hours.