Other than the devastating earthquakes that ravaged Turkey, this natural disaster may be the worst I have heard in my lifetime. As I compile this, the death toll from Sunday's tsunami rose from 44,000 to 50,000. 11 countries comprising Asia and Africa were hit A few towns closest to the sea were completely razed from the surge of water that has been described as three stories high.
I've picked out a few excerpts from articles I've read on the disaster this morning.
Death Toll Reaches 44,000
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.
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. A Hong Kong couple vacationing in Thailand clung to a mattress for six hours......
"We had never seen the sea looking like that. It was like as if a calm sea had suddenly become a raging monster," said one woman, Haalima, recalling the giant wave that swept away her 5-year-old grandson, Adil.
Adil was making sandcastles with his younger sister, Reeze, while Haalima sat in her home Sunday morning. Haalima said the girl ran to her complaining that waves had crushed their castles, then came screams and water entered the home. "When we looked, there was no shore anymore and no Adil," she said.....
A new danger emerged Tuesday: the floods uprooted land mines in Sri Lanka — a nation torn by a decades-old war with Tamil separatists in the north. The mines now threatened aid workers and survivors, UNICEF said.....
The disaster could be history's costliest, with "many billions of dollars" of damage, said U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination.
Asia Struggles with Disaster Aftermath, 50,000 Dead
In northern Indonesia's remote Aceh region, closest to the epicenter, bodies littered the streets. About 1,000 people lay on a sports field where they were killed when the three-story-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. Body parts jutted from the wreckage.
"I think this is her," he said. "I recognize her hand, but I'm not sure."
Here are a list of personal account articles:
Scenes of horror at French-run resort in Thailand
The Sound of Roaring Thunder...then Screaming by an Australian survivor Alexa Moses
In Their Own Words: More Accounts from Survivors
"The whole town is full of her family, and we've heard this morning that the entire village has been swept into the ocean and there's nothing but dead bodies. They can't find anybody and she's just ... I don't know what to bloody do."
- Steven Day whose Indonesian-born wife Ena Jenkins fears she has lost her entire family of almost 40 people to the waves which swamped villages in Aceh province on Sumatra.
The Sea Decided who was saved
The water hit as Kalaimaran pulled the freshly caught crabs and prawns out of his net. Like the other fishermen on the beach, he started running. When he saw his 4-year-old daughter, he yelled: "The sea is coming! Run!"
But she disappeared. For hours after he made it to safety, Kalaimaran searched for his missing family members: His daughter, his younger sister, his mother. He looked up and down the coast, under palm trees and in the wreckage of his village.
"We didn't know anything," said Kalaimaran, 34, who like many in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu uses only one name. "We just ran. Those who escaped, escaped. And those who were stuck, they died."
......
Everyone in Mariayi's village of Devanampattinam seemed to have lost someone--wives, husbands, daughters-in-law, sons, granddaughters, families. Here, the water came so quickly no one had time to run.
"The sea pushed us down," said Karthik, 20, whose wife and infant daughter perished. "And the sea decided who was saved."
About 300 people, mostly children, died in the village. Hundreds were buried in a grave about 100 feet wide and 20 feet deep. Survivors were taken to wedding halls, turned into makeshift shelters, less than a mile away. None wanted to go home.
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If you want information regarding the quake, hit this link to the the blog WorldChanging.
If you want to see a visual of the path of the tsunami radiating out from the epicenter of the quake, go to this NOAA site. (Requires QuickTime or WindowsMediaPlayer to view it.)
If you want information about the science of predicting tsunamis, see the article Scientists in USA Saw Tsunami Coming
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