Untold Numbers Are Missing in 6 Countries

The New York Times > International > Asia Pacific: "The world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years erupted underwater off the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Sunday and sent walls of water barreling thousands of miles, killing more than 19,000 people in half a dozen countries across South and Southeast Asia, with thousands more missing or unreachable.

The earthquake, which measured 9.0 in magnitude, set off tsunamis that built up speeds of as much as 500 miles per hour, then crashed into coastal areas of Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives and Malaysia as 40-foot-high walls of water, devouring everything and everyone in their paths.

Its force was felt more than 3,000 miles away in Somalia on the eastern coast of Africa, where nine people were reported killed. Aid agencies were rushing staff and equipment to the region, warning that rotting bodies were threatening health and water supplies.

A tsunami - the term is Japanese - is a series of waves generated by underwater seismic disturbances, in this case the interface of the India and Burma tectonic plates. Seismologists with the United States Geological Survey said the ocean west of Sumatra and the island chains to its north was a hot zone for earthquakes because of a nonstop collision occurring there between the India plate, beneath the Indian Ocean seabed, and the Burma plate under the islands and that part of the continent.

The India plate is moving at about two inches a year to the northeast, creating pressure that releases, sporadically, in seismic activity. But this was an especially devastating earthquake, the fourth most powerful in 100 years.

Television images showed bodies floating in muddied waters. Cars went out to sea; boats came onto land. Snorkelers were dragged onto the beach, and sunbathers out to sea, Simon Clark, a photographer who was vacationing on Ngai Island in Thailand, told The Associated Press.

Indonesia reported nearly 4,500 dead, most in the Banda Aceh area of Sumatra, a region that has been the site of a continuing civil war. In Sri Lanka, at least 6,000 were dead. In India, an estimated 2,300 died, with at least 1,700 confirmed dead in Tamil Nadu, the southern state that is home to this coastal city of Madras, officially known as Chennai.

At least three Americans were reported killed, two in Sri Lanka and one in Thailand, according to Noel Clay, a State Department spokesman. Many areas from the atolls of the Maldives to the Nicobar Islands of India were simply out of reach, with communication lines snapped. Thousands more people in those places are feared marooned or dead. India's home minister, Shivraj Patil, said there was no communication with 45,000 residents of the Nicobar Islands.

On Marina Beach here in Madras, women selling fish and children playing cricket, morning walkers and tourists savoring the salt-scented air all died as the sea suddenly turned enemy. The water came with no warning, said S. Muttukumar, a fisherman.

Whole fishing villages were washed away along coastlines, and thousands of fisherman who unknowingly put out to sea in the morning are missing. An Indian Air Force base on Car Nicobar Island was virtually washed away, according to television reports, and late reports suggested that at least 1,000 could be dead on the Nicobar Islands.

The airport in Male, the capital of the Maldives, was closed, stranding foreign tourists overnight at the airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, after much of Male was submerged. The casualties spread across southern India: at least 200 dead in Andhra Pradesh state, 80 in Kerala, and 280 in Pondicherry.

Sri Lanka, the island nation to India's south, was battered on both its east and west coasts. The Sri Lankan government declared a national disaster, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the rebel group that controls swaths of northern and eastern Sri Lanka, said it would declare its own national emergency.

The Tamilnet Web site cited reports from the Tamil Relief Organization that 1,000 bodies had been brought to hospitals in the north and east, with the toll expected to rise. Reuters reported looting in Sri Lanka, and officials said that at least 200 prisoners had escaped from a prison in Matara, about 100 miles south of Colombo, after it was damaged by the tsunami."