REUTERS-
A survivor yesterday looks at the pictures displayed on a board identifying her relatives killed by a tsunami on Sunday, at Velankani beach on the outskirts of Nagapattinam, 350 km (219 miles) south of the southern Indian city of Madras. Nations bordering the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to Sri Lanka clawed through the wreckage of a devastating quake-triggered tsunami for bodies to bury.
GALLE, Sri Lanka, (Reuters):
THE SEA and wreckage of coastal towns all around the Indian Ocean yielded up tens of thousands of bodies yesterday, pushing the toll from Sunday's tsunami past 60,000.
The apocalyptic destruction caused by the wave dwarfed the efforts of governments and relief agencies as they turned from rescuing survivors to trying to care for millions of homeless, increasingly threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses.
"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.
Sri Lanka and Indonesia reported death tolls around 19,000 each and expected them to keep rising.
UNDERSEA EARTHQUAKE
India's toll of 11,500 included at least 7,000 on one archipelago, the Andamans and Nicobar. On one island, the surge of water triggered by Sunday's cataclysmic undersea earthquake killed two-thirds of the population.
At magnitude 9.0, the tremor was the biggest in 40 years. The chasm that it tore in the seabed off the Indonesian island of Sumatra launched a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas tourists in Thailand.
The surge battered thousands of miles of coastline in a vast arc from Indonesia to Tanzania. Fishing villages, ports and resorts were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed.
In northern Indonesia's remote Aceh region, closest to the epicentre, bodies littered the streets. About 1,000 people lay on a sports field where they were killed when the three-storey-high wall of water struck.
Mahmud Azaf, a referee, lost his three children.
"I was in the field as a referee. The waves suddenly came in and I was saved by God - I got caught in the branches of a tree," he said.
Miles of shattered hotels along Thailand's Khao Lak beach, a magnet for Scandinavian and German tourists, began yielding up dead, bloated, gashed and mangled bodies.
The 770 dead so far counted at Khao Lak came from dozens of countries as well as Thailand.
"My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a hotel on the beach that had been knocked off its foundations. "I think this is her. I recognise her hand, but I'm not sure."
Around the ring of devastation, Sweden reported 1,500 citizens missing, the Czech Republic almost 400, Finland 200 and Italy and Germany 100.
The United Nations said the disaster was unique in encompassing such a large area and so many countries.
"The cost of the devastation will be in the billions of dollars," said Jan Egeland, head of the U.N. Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). "However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages ...that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone."
