Tsunami death toll rises above 225,000

[DenverChief]

Wow That is amazing I thought that the numbers were leveling out at around 160K...


JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesia's Health Ministry raised the country's death toll from the Dec. 26 tsunami to 166,320 on Wednesday, pushing the total number of people killed in the disaster above 225,000.

A Health Ministry statement said the new figure was based on latest reports from the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, which were directly in the path of the killer tsunami spawned by a magnitude-9 earthquake the day after Christmas.

The new death toll — a jump of more than 50,000 on the ministry's last figure — includes many people who were previously listed as missing, a senior ministry official told Reuters.

Meanwhile, a U.N. official said emergency aid deliveries to remote areas of Aceh province will have to increase sharply to avoid serious hunger and other problems. Daniel Augstburger, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the coastal city of Meulaboh, said not enough help was reaching people outside of major urban areas.

“The French are starting to move food, of course the Americans... are moving food out, but this has to increase ten-fold, I would say,” Augstburger told Reuters, adding that tsunami victims also needed items such as clothes and cooking utensils.

Meulaboh, about 150 miles south of the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, was cut off for several days following the Dec. 26 tsunami, which killed some 115,000 in the province and demolished large areas of
coastline.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6754820/

[go bo]

as they identify more bodies, the number will go up even more...

[DenverChief]

Originally Posted by go bo

as they identify more bodies, the number will go up even more...

it is hard to compredend...Denver City and County is home to about 500K people....trying to imagine half of them gone is insane