Tsunami
death toll near 150000
Searchers are giving up hope
of finding more survivors from last week's killer earthquake and tsunami, with authorities
saying Monday that thousands listed as missing were presumed dead
The world is turning its full attention to getting food and water to the living.
Deaths from the
disaster were nearing 150,000, after hardest-hit Indonesia added another 14,000 people to
the official count.
Sri Lanka and India
said they were almost ready to give up on more than 11,000 still unaccounted for.
More than a week
after the disaster struck the region without any advance notice, Indonesia also announced
plans to work with the country's neighbours to establish an early warning system similar
to that in the Pacific Ocean.
Aid workers,
meanwhile, were trying to help the millions of people displaced and devastated by the loss
of family and friends put their towns and villages back together.
The arrival of US
warships and helicopters carrying water, biscuits and other necessities highlighted the
scope of that task.
"I was in
Fallujah last summer and saw the devastation and damage there. But that was surgical and
aimed at specific targets," Andrews - who is part of a US four-member
military-civilian team sent to assess aid needs - said Sunday.
"Here it's total.
Everything is gone."
International donors, meeting
this week in Indonesia, have so far pledged about US$2 billion (euro1.5 billion).
But the needs of disaster
victims remain enormous, and relief efforts have been hampered by the destruction of
roads, ports and airfields.
In coastal villages such as
Kuede Teunom in Indonesia, survivors in mud-caked and tattered clothing grabbed at bottles
of water dropped from the air.
As the relief effort
continued to build, affected nations were also working to ensure that nothing on the scale
of last week's disaster would happen again.
Indonesian President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono on Monday said his nation would join in an international effort to set
up an early warning system to limit the loss of life in any similar catastrophe in the
future.
"This would be a kind of
pre-emptive measure," he told reporters.
Yudhoyono didn't specify how
many countries would be involved, but regional leaders were expected to endorse
establishing such a system during a donors' conference Thursday in Jakarta, organised
through the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
In Indonesia, the official
count of the dead stood at more than 94,000.
In Sri Lanka, where the
destruction was second only to Indonesia, officials added 1,026 more to the death toll and
conceded 5,540 people still missing would also likely be declared dead, bringing the
figure there to 35,000.
In India, authorities
expected the toll along that nation's southeast coast to reach 15,000.
Another 5,000 were dead along
Thailand's resort coast, with thousands more missing, and 500 were dead in seven other
nations in Asia and Africa.
Across the affected region,
hope was fading by the hour for the tens of thousands still missing.
"There is very little
chance of finding survivors after seven days," said Lamsar Sipahutar, the head of the
search team in Indonesia.
"We are about to stop
the search-and-rescue operations."
Reporters were given a look
at the wiped-out village of Malacca, on the Indian island of Car Nicobar, where the only
structure still standing was a statue of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.
About 4,000 people were
missing on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, east of the South Asian nation.
In Sri Lanka, ND
Hettiarachchi, director at the National Disaster Management Centre, said casualty figures
were still being reported from affected areas in the country's north and south coasts.
He said nearly 17,000 were
injured and almost one million people had been displaced and were living in temporary
camps at schools and religious places.
Children accounted for a
staggering 40 per cent, or 12,000, of the deaths in Sri Lanka, officials said.
But without bodies to mourn
over, many parents find it hard to believe their children are dead. Some were buried in
mass graves, before parents were told. Many were swept out to sea.
Day after day parents come at
dawn and wander the beach in the devastated districts of Ampara and Batticaloa.
"They believe their kids
are alive and the sea will return them - one day," UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy said on
Sunday, after touring this island country's tsunami-devastated shore.
In New York, UN humanitarian
chief Jan Egeland said 1.8 million people in tsunami-hit countries would need food aid and
that figure could rise.
It would take about three
days to get food to 700,000 people in Sri Lanka but much longer to reach the one million
hungry people in Indonesia, he said.
He warned there were still
difficulties in reaching survivors in Sumatra's Aceh province. AP
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