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December 29, 2004THE VICTIMS
Experts Say Accurate Toll Is Hard to CalculateBy DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Rapidly climbing death estimates from the earthquake-generated waves that struck a dozen countries Sunday are likely to be highly inaccurate for some time, despite the best efforts of aid officials to nail them down, experts said yesterday.
Estimates of the dead climbed to 57,000 yesterday, which would make the tsunami toll the worst in recorded history.
But because so many nations were struck, with such long, populous coastlines, an accurate count of the dead is nearly impossible.
Yesterday, teams began to reach remote parts of Sumatra, the Indonesian island closest to the earthquake's epicenter. Communications from some areas are still out, including on small islands that waves may have swept over.
Also, experts explained, inhabitants of coastal villages and urban waterfront slums are usually subsistence fishermen and farmers who are the least likely to be counted by census takers. The only records of tourists swept away are likely to be hotel registers, which may themselves now be on the ocean bottom.
Three areas hit by the tsunami are war zones with little government: the Aceh region of Indonesia, regions of Sri Lanka controlled by rebels and the coastline of Somalia.
Thousands more may die if cholera, malaria or other diseases break out in areas without fresh water or sewage disposal, or in refugee camps, United Nations officials warned.
No world agency is officially charged with collecting death tolls or checking them.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs issues daily situation reports, which often include estimates of the dead and displaced.
"But we don't do head counts ourselves," said Jamie McGoldrick, coordinator of the office's Geneva bureau. "We rely on government sources, and we go with the figures we're given."
News agency reports from the affected nations also relied chiefly on figures provided by government disaster centers.
The best way to check those figures may be the United Nations workers in each country. United Nations doctors are on teams with local health departments and the Red Cross, and report up parallel chains of command to United Nations representatives, who work with government ministers.
But aid workers are less interested in counting the dead than the living, who line up for food, water and blankets, Mr. McGoldrick pointed out. There is less urgency to account for bodies washed out to sea or buried in mass graves.
Alfred Ironside, a spokesman for Unicef, said India and Sri Lanka were the most likely to be able to report accurate estimates because they have networks of thousands of local health offices reporting data to state offices and then to the Indian capital, New Delhi.
It is normal for figures to fluctuate widely in the first few days after a disaster, experts said.
One day after an earthquake destroyed Bam, in southern Iran, one year ago, the initial estimates of the dead were about 25,000. The estimates rose slowly as freezing weather set in, and Iran's Interior Ministry officially set its estimate at 41,000, a figure widely quoted for three months. In March, the number was revised downward to 26,271, because many people had been counted twice in the original chaos.
The lowered estimate, Mr. McGoldrick said, grew out of efforts by the Red Cross and Red Crescent to figure out why so many people were in their refugee camps.
In the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, up to 10,000 people were initially feared dead after planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The figure of 6,000 settled in the public consciousness until weeks of careful counting revised it downward to about 3,200.
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