Over 50,000 dead from tidal wave

Reuters reports that the death toll from Sunday's tsunami in the Indian Ocean has now passed 50,000. This is more than double the number I heard yesterday; and just as I am writing this on the television news they now say it could rise past 80,000:

"The apocalyptic destruction caused by the wave dwarfed the efforts of governments and relief agencies as they turned from rescuing survivors to trying to care for millions of homeless, increasingly threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses....

"...Sri Lanka and Indonesia reported death tolls around 19,000 each and expected them to keep rising.

"India's toll of 11,500 included at least 7,000 on one archipelago, the Andamans and Nicobar. On one island, the surge of water triggered by Sunday's cataclysmic undersea earthquake killed two-thirds of the population.

"At magnitude 9.0, the tremor was the biggest in 40 years. The chasm that it tore in the seabed off the Indonesian island of Sumatra launched a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas tourists in Thailand.

"The surge battered thousands of miles of coastline in a vast arc from Indonesia to Tanzania. Fishing villages, ports and resorts were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed...

The cost of the relief effort will be in the billions of dollars, according to a U.N relief official, while hundreds of thousands of villagers have lost their livelihoods. The death toll may continue to rise as contaminated water and dead bodies spread disease; also in Sri Lanka from landmines that have come loose from the flooding.

Update: The death toll is now estimated at over 158,000.