Aid agencies seeking help for Asia
Organizations struggle to cope with scale of tsunami disaster and hope for a boost in online donations to help finance relief efforts.
The death toll had reached 40,000 people in 11 countries by Tuesday morning, according to the Associated Press.
"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.
The IFRC has issued a flash appeal for $6.6 million for survivors after the tsunami hit a number of Asian nations following a massive 9-magnitude earthquake under the Indian Ocean off Indonesia's Sumatra island.
"We realize now by dispatching emergency units that there is a big gap already, so we will be revising our appeal up very soon," Geleta told Reuters. "I would not be surprised if (the international headquarters in) Geneva made it three times or more."
For many desperate survivors, aid has been too slow in coming. In Indonesia's Banda Aceh, fear was mixed with anger as residents queued outside the few open shops guarded by soldiers.
"Where is the assistance? There is nothing. All the government are asleep," said Mirza, a 28-year-old resident.
In southern Thailand, local people were using spades, hoes and hand saws to try to reach survivors and the dead.
Several Asian nations have sent naval ships carrying emergency supplies and doctors to devastated coastal areas.
A Thai naval ship with an onboard hospital was headed to the devastated island resort of Phuket, where 203 people are known to have died and many more were injured. Doctors and nurses operated in makeshift surgeries on Thailand's west coast.
Thailand's national blood center called for urgent supplies of rhesus negative blood, more common among foreigners. Hundreds of Western tourists were killed at beach resorts in Thailand and Sri Lanka and many more injured, bones broken and cut by debris.
Relief teams in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, two of the worst affected nations, sought to prevent the spread of disease from rotting corpses and putrefied water by burying corpses in mass graves and flying in shelter and water sanitation kits.
"Hundreds of thousands of people fought to survive the tsunamis on Sunday. Now we need to help them survive the aftermath," said UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy.
"We're concerned about providing safe water, which is urgent in all these countries, and about preventing the spread of disease. For children, the next few days will be the most critical," said Bellamy from the U.N. children's fund.
UNICEF said Sri Lankan survivors faced a new threat from land-mines dislodged by the tsunami. There are an estimated 2 million land-mines in Sri Lanka.
"Mines were floated by the floods and washed out of known minefields, so now we don't know where they are and the warning signs on mined areas have been swept away or destroyed," UNICEF's Ted Chaiban said in Colombo.
"The greatest danger to civilians will come when they begin to return to their homes, not knowing where the mines are," Chaiban said.
The United Nations said hundreds of relief planes packed with emergency goods would arrive in Sri Lanka, where the death toll was over 12,000, within the next 48 hours.
A UNICEF flight from Copenhagen was carrying 45 tons of supplies, including oral rehydration salts for sick children and medical supplies to serve 150,000 people for three months.
Oxfam Community Aid Abroad said it had sent 60 1,000-liter water tanks to Trincomalee in northeast Sri Lanka and was preparing 25,000 food packs. Oxfam had also delivered plastic sheeting for shelter for 10,000 homeless families in Sri Lanka.
Millions have been left homeless.
"This is a massive humanitarian disaster and with communications so bad in many areas, we still don't know the full scale of it," Oxfam Community Aid Abroad executive director Andrew Hewett told reporters in Australia.
The IFRC said it feared the death toll would rise significantly once access was gained to troubled areas such as Indonesia's Aceh and the coastal areas of Myanmar, where the military government has admitted to only 34 deaths.
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