At Least 13,000 Die in Tsunami

By Shankhadeep Choudhury and Paul Watson

Dec. 27, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writers

MADRAS, India —

A series of towering waves triggered by a massive undersea earthquake killed more than 13,000 people Sunday, wiping out whole villages and hammering resorts across thousands of miles of coastline in South Asia and beyond.

Survivors described walls of water between 10 and 20 feet high toppling buildings and sweeping away victims from Indonesia to the Maldives. Even in Somalia, 3,000 miles from the quake’s epicenter, nine deaths from the tsunami were reported.

The catastrophe began when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the world’s biggest in 40 years, struck just before 7 a.m. beneath the Indian Ocean 155 miles southeast of Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The quake, about 200 times as powerful as the 1994 Northridge temblor, spawned tsunami waves that traveled at high speed through a region that lacks any warning system. Ocean buoys in a tsunami warning network can alert people to a lethal wave’s approach hours before it hits, giving them time to move to higher ground.

Possibly the worst-hit country was Sri Lanka, a war-ravaged island off the southern tip of India, where wave after wave of surging tides created rivers of seawater that carried people away along with cars and the rubble of collapsing buildings. More than 6,000 people died there.

In Indonesia, health officials said more than 4,400 people were killed on Sumatra, most of them in the northern province of Aceh, where entire villages were swept away and bodies were lodged in trees. Many of the dead were children, officials said.

Nearly 2,300 were reported killed in India, 600 in Thailand, including tourists, and more than 40 in Malaysia. In the Maldives, more than 30 were dead and two-thirds of the capital, Male, was underwater. A dozen people in Myanmar and at least two in Bangladesh also died. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless.

At least three Americans were among the dead, two in Sri Lanka and one in Thailand, the State Department said.

As dawn broke today, aid teams from around the world rushed to devastated areas. Concern was mounting that decomposing corpses could spread disease and contaminate water supplies.

The United Nations said it would give cash grants to governments for immediate humanitarian needs -- portable sanitation facilities, medical supplies, tents and helicopters for evacuation.

“This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history,” U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland told CNN. He said the longer-term effects might be as devastating as the tsunami itself.

Sri Lanka

When the waves hit Sri Lanka, anyone who could grab hold of anything that wasn’t moving did so, and clung to it desperately for life, witnesses said. But many lost their grip and were pulled to their deaths.

Sri Lankan officials estimate that between 100,000 and 200,000 homes were destroyed, President Chandrika Kumaratunga said in a televised interview.

“We weren’t very well prepared, I have to say, because we have not ever had to face this kind of disaster,” said the Sri Lankan leader, whose country is struggling to overcome almost 18 years of civil war with Tamil Tiger separatists.

From rebel-held areas in the north, down the eastern coast to tourist resorts in the south, Sri Lanka suffered widespread devastation. Thousands of people were reported heading for the capital, Colombo, to seek shelter.

Rescue workers told the Reuters news agency that 22 of the dead in Yala were Japanese tourists.

Residents of Kosgoda, 45 miles south of Colombo, described their coastal town as a cemetery.

“There is no Kosgoda, no Kosgoda Village Hotel, no restaurants,” said Jothimune Saman Perera, a 40-year-old tour operator, choking on sobs. “Everywhere there are bodies.... I have no words to explain.”

Another Kosgoda resident, Kumani de Silva, 20, said a neighbor saw the first wave and warned her to drive away.

“Now all we have left is our clothes and the car. Our new hotel, with the big, blue roof -- absolutely everything is gone, only the roof and the inner walls are left. The tuktuk [motorized rickshaw] has disappeared into the water, all the furniture, everything. Our other neighbor, a fat fisherman, is dead.”

India

In India, tsunami waves pounded hundreds of miles of the country’s eastern coast and even part of Kerala state on the western side of the nation’s southern tip. In Madras, the devastation stretched about half a mile inland.

The death toll is expected to climb substantially because more than 3,000 people were reported missing in India’s Tamil Nadu state alone. The toll rose steadily Sunday as the scale of the disaster became known.

Hundreds of fishing villages dot India’s long, wave-battered eastern coast, and in beach areas of Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu, hundreds of bodies were recovered from tangles of fallen trees, splintered lumber and other debris.

In the Four Shore Estate, a middle-class housing complex on Madras’ Marina Beach, the waves picked up stoves, televisions, refrigerators, furniture and even cars and sucked them out to sea, where they bobbed like beach toys before sinking. Nearby, poor fishermen and their families wept over the corpses of drowned loved ones.

Father Lawrence Raj, parish priest at the beachside Church of St. Thomas, was asleep when he felt the first shockwaves of the earthquake early Sunday, he said in an interview. People ran in panic during the tremor that Raj said persisted for 15 minutes.

“That was the strongest tremor that I have ever experienced,” he said.

When calm returned, the priest sat down for breakfast. Just as he was finishing, about two hours after the temblor, he heard a loud noise and sent someone to investigate.

“He came back running, describing 15-foot-high waves,” Raj said. “We could see the waves,” which pounded the area, he added. Many of the dead “were either playing cricket [or] jogging near the beach.”

Officials reported 300 people dead and 700 missing in India’s remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, southwest of Thailand and north of the massive earthquake’s epicenter.

Three Indian navy ships and several helicopters launched search-and-rescue operations along the coast.

At least 64 bodies, 18 of them children’s, filled the morgue of the Royapettah government hospital in central Madras. Doctors treated 22 other people with serious injuries.

A 60-year-old man who identified himself as Ponurangan said he managed to survive by clinging to a coconut tree with all his strength.

The body of his 55-year-old wife, Davamani, was recovered Sunday afternoon, tangled in a tree, he said.

Arun Kumar, a 32-year-old cook, was working at a Juhu Beach country club in Madras, which officially has been renamed Chennai. He was packing up supplies for a party of 80 people when a huge wave engulfed him.

“I am lucky to be alive,” said Kumar, who suffered a fractured right leg and dislocated his left arm.

Several hundred yards from the sea, in the Srinivasapuram slum of central Madras, slabs of broken concrete were strewn about with pieces of thatched roofs, scattered kitchen utensils and the remains of uneaten meals.

The huge waves had picked up a bus, shoved it several yards and smashed it against the wall of a community center built for 30,000 shanty dwellers, most of them families of fishermen or unskilled workers.

At least 94 people, more than half of them under 10 years old, have been reported missing from the slum.

Up to 1,000 shanties have been destroyed.

Indonesia

In Indonesia, at least 3,000 of the victims were in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province, and officials said the death toll was likely to rise. Communication with many coastal areas was impossible, and the extent of the damage there remained uncertain.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the government had dispatched aid officials to the region.

The province has been under strict military control for the last 18 months because of a separatist rebellion.

“We have stopped recovering bodies and will begin again first thing in the morning,” Lt. Col. Belyuni, the military chief for North Aceh district, told El Shinta radio late Sunday. “It’s possible the death toll will mount because many corpses are still caught up in trees.”

Some residents watched as the waves approached, apparently without realizing the danger, and were swept out to sea, officials said.

Indonesia’s Metro TV station showed a mother screaming and hugging her dead child. In other footage, residents ran in panic through the coastal city of Lhokseumawe.

More than 200 inmates escaped from a prison when a wave knocked down its walls in the town of Pidie in Aceh, Reuters quoted a police official as saying. A few later turned themselves in.

Thailand

In Thailand, officials said nearly 400 people died and hundreds were missing in the resort area of Phuket and the coastal region of Phang Nga to the north. The victims in Phuket included foreign tourists who were sunbathing or snorkeling.

Some witnesses said the wave struck Phuket at three stories and crashed into beach hotels. Afterward, cars and chairs littered the ocean offshore.

Michael Murtaugh, a resident of Phuket, said huge boats that had been resting in the harbor were thrown up side streets along with four-wheel-drive trucks that appeared to have flipped over repeatedly before they came to rest in hotel lobbies, restaurants and shops. The mile of paved beachfront promenade was destroyed, he said.

Murtaugh knew something was wrong when he heard helicopters and planes over Patong Beach for the first time since his arrival in Phuket in May.

“It wasn’t long before people started streaming up our hillside road, dragging their soaked possessions in shock and bewilderment,” he said. Many people were looking for friends or spouses who had disappeared.

On nearby Phi Phi Island, 200 bungalows at two resorts were swept out to sea, along with some of the resorts’ staff and clients, Associated Press said.

Malaysia

In Malaysia, many victims drowned while swimming or riding jet skis near crowded beaches, many on weekend trips to the resort island of Penang. More than 100 people remained missing in Penang, the state’s civil defense director, Mohamad Johari Mohamad Taufik, told Associated Press.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Aid for quake and tsunami victims

These aid agencies are among those accepting contributions for assistance that they or their affiliates will provide for those affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Asia. For links to these and other aid agencies, go to www.latimes.com/tsunami.

American Jewish World Service

45 W. 36th Street, 10th Floor

New York, NY 10018

800-889-7146

www.ajws.org

American Red Cross

International Response Fund

P.O. Box 37243

Washington, DC 20013

800-HELP NOW

www.redcross.org

Catholic Relief Services