Death toll tops 58,000

U.N.: Disease could double number killed

New York ? A new day brought new horror Tuesday as the toll from the Asian tsunami disaster shot past 58,000 dead — with tens of thousands, including hundreds of Americans, still missing in the most far-reaching catastrophe in recorded history.

Remote Indian islands were wiped off the map, 1,500 Sri Lankans drowned inside their vacation train and one Indonesian town reported a quarter of its 40,000 people perished.

The U.N. health agency warned that disease could double the toll yet again.

“The sea was full of bodies,” said Sukardi Kasdi, who fled his remote Indonesian town of Surang to seek help.

“I don’t know how long everyone else will survive,” he said.

The arc of death stretching across five time zones ranks as the deadliest tsunami ever — and the worst natural disaster of any kind in more than a decade.

The number of dead Americans has climbed to 12, and hundreds more are still unaccounted for.

Overall, more than 100 foreigners are confirmed dead, but officials predicted that toll would spike to 1,000 or more when missing tourists are finally tallied.

The United States increased its initial aid pledge to $35 million, and Secretary of State Powell bristled at a U.N. official’s jibe that wealthy nations were being “stingy.”

A girl receives a tetanus shot from a medic at a relief camp in Nagore, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. More than 58,000 people are reported dead across southern Asia as a result of massive tsunamis set off by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Indonesia's coast on Sunday. Health experts fear that many more could die of disease in the aftermath of the disaster.

Seventy-two hours after a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, spawned a disaster of biblical proportions, new horrors were still emerging.

Some of the most dramatic devastation took place in the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands far off India’s east coast near the quake’s epicenter.

Two-thirds of the 1,500 people on the islet of Chowra were killed when the giant waves swept across it, and officials said they had been unable to contact several islands with thousands of inhabitants.

“It’s flat, and people had no place to run,” an Indian official said.

Hunger and disease

An aerial view shows a destroyed and flooded village near the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The earthquake that spawned the killer tsunami struck off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, near Aceh Province.

Even as relief supplies poured into the region, hunger posed a major problem for survivors, many of whom are still cut off from the world.

Desperate survivors battled over coconuts and bananas in Indonesia and pleaded for more help in flood-ravaged Tamil Nadu province in India.

In Indonesia’s quake-battered Aceh province, survivors who hadn’t eaten in three days looted relief supplies as convoys of food finally reached the capital of Banda Aceh.

“People are looting, but not because they are evil, but because they are hungry,” said Red Cross official Irman Rachmat.

Volunteers load bodies into coffins in preparation for cremation near Takuapa, Thailand. The death toll in Thailand was at 1,500 Tuesday and expected to rise as bodies continue to be collected from the damaged beach areas near Phuket and other southern Thailand areas.

An even deadlier threat stalking ravaged nations is disease, which could wreak havoc on millions of increasingly vulnerable survivors.

Overwhelmed medics and hospitals are bracing for outbreaks of cholera, dysentery and malaria, along with other diseases spawned by a lack of clean water and sanitation.

“The initial terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer term suffering,” warned Dr. David Nabarro, head of crisis operations for the World Health Organization.

A rescue and cleanup crew surveys a flooded lobby at the Seapearl Beach Hotel along Patong Beach on Phuket Island, Thailand, on Tuesday after massive tsunami waves smashed coastlines Sunday morning. The Thai government said 1,516 people in the country died, among them more than 700 tourists.

Areas still not reached

But for now, the death wrought by the killer wave is still being uncovered.

In the teardrop-shaped nation of Sri Lanka, the scope of the disaster knocked the wind out of rescuers when they found a train carrying vacationers to the shore had become a submerged steel tomb as it chugged through the idyllic palm groves near the town of Galle.

Perhaps 1,500 people perished — the highest toll in any one spot and the worst disaster in the history of railroads — as the tsunami’s roiling water swept the train off its rails and filled the cars before receding.

Rescuers still hadn’t reached the Indonesia town of Meulaboh, where an estimated 10,000 out of a population of 40,000 died.