European tourists began returning home with horror stories. Pat Faragher of London arrived shoeless at Heathrow Airport with her husband, Bill, having survived after a huge wave blasted through the glass door of their hotel room in Sri Lanka. "We have lost everything -- no passports, no papers. All our belongings were swept away," she told reporters. "But we're alive."
"It was like in a horror movie," a German tourist who arrived in Frankfurt from Thailand on Monday morning told German TV. "All the wrecked cars and motorbikes swimming in the water. I was only running for my life to the next mountain and -- well, I was lucky. At the airport I met two Germans whose legs were torn into pieces from all the wood parts that the wave would carry."
The quake struck just before 7 a.m. Sunday, 155 miles southeast of the city of Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. As the sea floor buckled, a colossal surge of water radiated out, reaching the speed of a passenger jet before eventually striking land. Although scientists in the area and around the globe knew of the quake immediately and recognized that it could pose a tsunami danger, officials in the region did not warn coastal dwellers, who were taken by surprise.
"Everyone was just taking their normal Sunday morning. You never expect a 30-foot wave to come and destroy you," said Prasad Punchihewa, who works in Colombo for SriLankan Airlines. "It's just devastating, and all this happening to innocent, poor people."
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies put the 10-nation death toll at 23,710, but said nearly 5,000 people were missing and that the number of dead would surely rise. The Swiss-based organization also said that more than 1 million people had been displaced and over 200,000 had lost their homes.
Authorities in the stricken countries offered their own counts of the dead, totaling more than 26,000: 12,500 in Sri Lanka, 7,000 in India, 5,700 in Indonesia, 1,010 in Thailand, 60 in Malaysia, 43 in the Maldives, 57 in Myanmar, three in the Seychelles and two in Bangladesh. Hundreds were reported killed in Somalia -- 3,000 miles from the quake's epicenter.
But Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll in his country alone could reach 25,000, Reuters reported.
Eight Americans were believed to be among the dead. Norwegians, Britons, Italians, Swedes, Danes, Australians, Japanese and others were also killed. Israel reported hundreds of its citizens unaccounted for.
