Indian Ocean Tsunami Death Toll Approaches Quarter Million

TECTONICS

Deadliest natural disasters of the past 100 years
The Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, which has claimed around 220,000 victims according to an updated toll Wednesday, ranks among the eight deadliest natural disasters of the past century.

December 1908: an earthquake and tidal wave destroy the Sicilian city of Messina and Reggio di Calabria and Palmi in mainland Italy, killing between 70,000 and 100,000 people.

December 1920: an estimated 200,000 people die in an earthquake in Ningxia, north-western China.

September 1923: an earthquake destroys much of Yokohama in Japan, setting off major fires and claiming 143,000 lives.

May 1927: Up to 200,000 people die when an earthquake hits Nanshan province in southern China.

December 1932: an earthquake strikes Gansu province in north-western China, killing 70,000.

October 1942: a cyclone leaves 61,000 dead or missing in southern Bangladesh.

May 1970: an earthquake triggers landslides which kill 66,000 people in northern Peru.

November 1970: almost 300,000 people are killed in a cyclone and tidal wave in Bangladesh.

July 1976: an earthquake levels Tangshan city in Hebei province, China. The official death toll is put at 242,000 but western experts estimate the number of dead at 700,000.

April 1991: a cyclone followed by massive floods in Bangladesh claims more than 139,000 lives.

December 2004: a powerful undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, unleashes huge waves that slam into Indian Ocean coastlines from Indonesia, which is worst hit, to East Africa. Nearly a month later, the death toll is put at 220,000.-->

Banda Aceh, Indonesia (AFP) Jan 19, 2005
The death toll from last month's Indian Ocean tsunami disaster rose towards a quarter of a million Wednesday while floods hampered relief efforts in worst-hit Indonesia's Aceh province.

The Indonesian death toll jumped to 166,320, the health ministry said late Wednesday, more than 50,000 higher than the government's previous tally.

A member of the ministry's disaster centre, Dr. Ina, told AFP that 166,080 people had been confirmed killed in Aceh, while there were 240 fatalities in the neighbouring province of North Sumatra.

With the latest tolls, the tsunamis triggered by a 9.0-magnitude quake off the coast of Sumatra island have left nearly 220,000 dead in 11 Indian Ocean countries.

Officials still hauling decomposed bodies from Aceh's tsunami debris said about 3,500 cadavers were being removed each day, more than three weeks after the disaster, while monsoon floods created a new headache for relief workers trying to bring aid along inundated roads.

The secretary of Aceh's disaster control taskforce, Haniff Asmara, told AFP the body collection process was likely to take another month.

The United Nations' chief humanitarian coordinator, Jan Egeland, had earlier warned the fatality figure could rise exponentially in Indonesia as information arrived from isolated areas.

Addressing an international financial summit in Jakarta on Wednesday, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said "perhaps we will never know the exact scale of the human casualties".

The giant waves which hit on December 26 killed about 31,000 people in Sri Lanka and more than 5,300 in Thailand. India has recorded 10,744 deaths with 5,669 people still missing.

It is already the world's worst tsunami disaster.

Meanwhile, relief officials said floods were delaying trucks carrying supplies from reaching Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh.

International Organisation for Migration (IOM) spokesman Chris Lom told AFP a convoy of 40 trucks returning from Banda Aceh, the aid distribution hub for Aceh, to the North Sumatran capital of Medan had been forced to halt its journey overnight because of floods.

Lom said aid workers were more concerned about the weather than a long-running separatist insurgency in the province and other threats.

"Flooding is a bigger problem than security," he said. "It's not an insurmountable problem, not a major one, but if the flooding gets much worse, it will be."

Lom said he expected the rain to pose a continuing concern as January and February were traditionally the wettest months of the year in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's government said it wants fresh peace talks with Aceh's separatist rebels and hopes to start dialogue later this month.

"Behind-the-scenes moves are ongoing toward reconciliation," Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda said Wednesday. "It is our hope... that there will be a meeting by the end of this month."

Separately, Norway's top peace envoy arrived in Sri Lanka Wednesday to launch the first post-tsunami attempt to salvage faltering peace efforts between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels.

Erik Solheim, who initially raised Sri Lanka's peace hopes with a landmark meeting with Tamil Tiger rebel chief Velupillai Prabhakaran in November 2000, is to make a fresh bid to save the troubled initiative, officials said.

Global distress at the tsunamis has led to a rush of proposals to build early warning alarms to protect against giant waves and the United Nations announced Wednesday it would set up a global system to predict disasters.

The UN science agency UNESCO, which is spearheading the project, said it hoped a decision could be made on a system by July so it could be up and running by mid-2006.

"Right now we have several proposals which are completely uncoordinated by different countries. What we need to do is coordinate them," said Patricio Bernal, head of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, at a disaster conference in Kobe, Japan.

Asked whether all nations would agree to work together on the tsunami warning system, Bernal said: "At a technical level, yes."

On a political level "that could be a little more difficult", he said.

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TECTONICS

Scientists Get To Work On Early Warning System After Tsunami Disaster

Kobe, Japan (AFP) Jan 18, 2005
Scientists from about 150 countries got to work Tuesday on an action plan to save lives during disasters through planning and warnings amid the shock over the Asian tsunami catastrophe.

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