Aceh deaths might hit 80,000
Topic: Deaths
Aceh deaths might hit 80,000: UN official

BANDA ACEH, Aceh (Reuters): The death toll in Indonesia's Aceh province from a quake and tsunami that struck on Sunday might reach between 50,000 and 80,000, a UN official said on Wednesday.

"I would say we are probably talking about somewhere in the order of 80,000 people, 50 to 80,000 people, that would be my educated guess," Michael Elmquist, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Indonesia, told reporters.

"It's a guess based on the relation between the numbers we have so far and our experience from other earthquake disasters."
Elmquist said the coastal town of Meulaboh alone may have had 40,000 deaths.

"The news I got from a government official on arrival today was that their estimate was that a third of the population (of Meulaboh) had been wiped out, which would equal 40,000 people."
The latest official government estimate of the death toll for all of Indonesia is 36,268 deaths. Aceh was by far the hardest hit province in the country.

Asked if he was surprised by how high the death toll might go, Elmquist said: "I wouldn't be surprised at all."

He said while several other countries in the region had been hit by tsunamis on Sunday, triggered by a powerful undersea quake just off Aceh, Indonesia had been struck especially hard by the quake, the epicenter of which was about 150 km from Meulaboh.
"The other countries were basically hit by a tidal wave on the beach. What we had here in Aceh is a combination of serious earthquake and tidal wave," Elmquist said.

The 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the biggest in 40 years, triggered a wall of water up to 10 meters high. Official estimates thus far put total deaths in the countries hit by the quake and tsunami at more than 67,000. (***)

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