Soldiers searched for bodies in treetops, families wept over the dead lined up on beaches and rescuers scoured coral isles for missing tourists as Asia counted the cost yesterday of a tsunami that killed more than 23,000. Idyllic palm-fringed beaches across southern Asia were transformed into scenes of death and devastation by the waves unleashed by the world’s biggest earthquake in 40 years that struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra early on Sunday.

“Death came from the sea,” Satya Kumari, a construction worker living on the outskirts of the former French enclave of Pondicherry, India, told Reuters. “The waves just kept chasing us. It swept away all our huts. What did we do to deserve this?” The wall of water up to 10 metres tall flattened houses, hurled fishing boats onto coastal roads, sent cars spinning through swirling waters into hotel lobbies and sucked sunbathers and fishermen off beaches and out to sea.

Worst affected were Sri Lanka where 4,890 were killed, the southeast coast of India where officials reported as many as 4,600 could be dead, northern Indonesia with up to 4,500 drowned and the southern tourist isles of Thailand where as many as 400 were feared dead.

“We are not well equipped to deal with a disaster of this magnitude because we have never known a disaster like this,” Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who declared a national disaster and appealed for donor aid, said from holiday in Britain. It was the worst natural disaster to hit Sri Lanka in recorded history. Officials the death toll could rise substantially as troops recovered bodies dragged out to sea or smashed on golden beaches.

Indonesian soldiers searched for bodies in tree tops and in the wreckage of homes smashed by the tsunami, triggered by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of northern Sumatra island killing at least 4,448 people there.

“It smells so bad, fishy. The human bodies are mixed in with dead animals like dogs, fish, cats and goats,” said marine colonel Buyung Lelana, head of an evacuation team in Lhokseumawe in Sumatra’s Aceh province. “There are still a lot of bodies under the wreckage of collapsed houses and in rivers and swamps that we have not yet evacuated. Most of them are children and their mothers,” he said.

International aid agencies rushed staff, equipment and money to the region, warning that bodies rotting in the water were already beginning to threaten the water supply for survivors. The Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it was seeking 7.5 million Swiss francs ($ 6.5 million) for emergency aid funding.

<B>Battered by rocks </B>

“Many of the dead bodies were found in houses. Their heads were cracked, probably battered by rocks,” said Mustofa, mayor of Bireuen regency on the north coast of Sumatra. The head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Los Angeles said US officials who detected the undersea quake tried frantically to get a warning out about the tsunami. But there was no official alert system in the region, said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s center in Honolulu.

“It took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get ... to the west coast of Thailand and Malaysia,” he said. “We tried to do what we could. We don’t have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world,” he said. The earthquake was the world’s biggest since 1964 and the fourth-largest since 1900.

Hundreds of thousands left homeless in Sri Lanka and fearing another devastating wave sheltered in temples and schools. The southern coastal town of Galle, a major industrial hub famed for its historic fort, had been submerged by a 9-metre wave. Wailing relatives scrambled over hundreds of bodies piled in a hospital in nearby Karapitiya, searching for loved ones.

Residents milled in streets outside the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital, shirts or handkerchiefs clutched over their noses against the overpowering stench of decaying bodies. “We have got hundreds of dead that we have dealt with,” said a hospital official. “I don’t know what to do.” Corpses of hundreds of those drowned lay bloated and disfigured in the lobby and corridors. A stream of cars, ambulances and trucks arrived, bringing more dead.

The body of a pregnant woman lay in the lobby. Nearby, a woman collapsed as she identified a relative. Many of the dead were children. A nurse wept as she picked up the body of a baby. Officials said 800,000 people had been forced from their homes. On India’s southeast coast, thousands of villagers huddled inside emergency shelters, too scared to sleep in case of another tsunami.

“I could see dead bodies all around and the devastation is of colossal proportions,” Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa said after touring the worst hit areas of her state. “I have been waiting for my husband and brother since yesterday,” wept 38-year-old Narasamma as she stood on a beach near Mypadu, a fishing hamlet 600 km south of Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh. “I am not sure they will come back,” she said. On the horizon, the wreckage of wooden fishing boats dotted the sea.

<B>Tourist isle devastated </B>

The tourist islands and beaches of southern Thailand lay in the path of the wave that had killed up to 400. On the Patong tourist beach in Phuket, hotels and restaurants were wrecked and speed boats were rammed into buildings. “I was sitting on the first floor of a bar, not far from the beach, watching cricket,” said Australian tourist, Stephen Dicks, 42. “And suddenly all these people came screaming from the beach.

“I looked around and saw a massive wall of water rushing down the street. It completely wiped out the ground floor of my bar ... It happened very fast, in a matter of minutes.” The tsunami was so powerful it smashed boats and flooded areas along the east African coast, 6,000 km away. In the Maldives, where thousands of foreign visitors were holidaying in the beach paradise, damage appeared to be limited.

With communications cut to remote areas, it was impossible to assess the full scale of the disaster, aid agencies said. The Indian air force was trying to reach the remote Nicobar and Andaman archipelagos near the heart of the quake where officials said as many as 2,000 were feared dead. A tsunami, a Japanese word that translates as “harbour wave”, is usually caused by a sudden rise or fall of part of the earth’s crust under or near the ocean.

It is not a single wave, but a series of waves that can travel across the ocean at speeds of more than 800 km an hour. As the tsunami enters the shallows of coastlines in its path, its velocity slows but its height increases and it can strike with devastating force.

<B>10 largest earthquakes since 1900</B>

•May 22, 1960 - Chile - An earthquake measuring 9.5 struck Santiago and Concepcion, triggering tidal waves and volcanic eruptions. Some 5,000 people were killed and 2 million made homeless. l March 28, 1964 - Alaska - An earthquake and ensuing tsunami claimed 125 lives and caused about $ 311 million in property loss. The quake, measuring 9.2, was felt over a large area of Alaska and in parts of western Yukon Territory and British Columbia, Canada. l March 9, 1957 - Alaska - An earthquake measuring 9.1 hit the Andreanof Islands. On Umnak Island, Mount Vsevidof erupted after being dormant for 200 years, generating a 15-metre high tsunami that continued to Hawaii. l Dec 26, 2004 - Indonesia - A quake measuring 9.0 struck the coast of Aceh province on the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed over 16,400 in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India. l Nov 4, 1952 - Russia - An earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 generated a tsunami which struck the Hawaiian islands. No lives were lost.

• Jan 31, 1906 - Ecuador - An earthquake with a magnitude of 8.8 struck near the coast of Ecuador and Colombia, generating a strong tsunami that killed up to 1,000. It was felt all along the coast of Central America and as far north as San Francisco and west to Japan. l Feb 4, 1965 - Alaska - Measuring 8.7, the quake generated a tsunami reported to be about 10.7 metres high on Shemya Island. l Aug 15, 1950 - Tibet/India - Two thousand homes, temples and mosques were destroyed in a quake measuring 8.6. Hardest hit was the Brahmaputra Basin in northeast India. At least 1,500 people were killed. l Feb 3, 1923 - Russia - Kamchatka was struck by a quake with a magnitude of 8.5. Feb 1, 1938 - Indonesia - l An 8.5 magnitude earthquake in the Banda Sea generated tsunamis causing great damage on Banda and Kai, volcanic islands in eastern Indonesia.

<B>Measuring the magnitude of earthquakes</B>

Over 23 000 people have been killed and tens of thousands left homeless after a powerful undersea earthquake unleashed a giant tsunami wave that crashed into the coasts of south and southeast Asia. The earthquake that struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra early on Sunday was measured at 9.0 magnitude by the US Geographical Survey (USGS), making it the world’s biggest in 40 years. Following are details about how earthquakes are measured based on information from the USGS: Sunday’s earthquake had a moment magnitude of 9.0, the USGS said. Moment magnitudes are typically carried out on quakes larger than 5.5-magnitude. Richter-type formulas read the frequency and amplitude of the seismic waves, which are vibrations from earthquakes. Moment magnitudes measure the size of the rupture caused by the earthquake – how much of the earth’s crust broke.

Although they are different formulas, the two figures are often not far apart. The magnitude of an earthquake, usually expressed by the Richter Scale, is a measure of the amplitude of the seismic waves. The moment magnitude of an earthquake is a measure of the amount of energy released – an amount that can be estimated from seismograph readings. The Richter method of measuring quakes has been upgraded and improved upon since it was developed in 1935 by Charles F. Richter. “All the formulas that we use originally came from variations and upgrades of Richter’s original formulas,” said Don Blakeman, USGS earthquake analyst at Golden, Colorado. “What it amounts to is that there are a number of different formulas and they are applied in specific cases to get the best representation of the size of the earthquake,” he said.