Exact count may never be known
Many lost at sea or in remote areas
Counting the dead from this week's tsunamis in South Asia is a logistical nightmare, as relief officials contend with casualties spread across 11 countries, including many remote islands and villages whose exact populations were never officially tallied. Thousands of bodies are probably lost at sea, making them impossible to count, and relief groups say the government of at least one country, Burma, is not being candid about the extent of the disaster there.
The estimated toll from Sunday's enormous waves has climbed from 11,000 in the immediate aftermath to more than 52,000 yesterday, as government officials reached isolated places such as India's Chowra Island -- where two-thirds of the inhabitants are believed to have died.
United Nations officials expect the death toll to rise further, but authorities on estimating such tolls say the world will never know exactly how many died.
"We should not expect great precision in these kind of numbers. There has been no great accurate count of these people while they were living" and it's unlikely to happen now that they're dead, said William Moomaw, professor of international environmental policy in the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
To be sure, ordinary people are doing everything they can to recover bodies, not just out of respect, but also out of a concern for hygiene, said Dr. Lynn Amowitz, director of evidence-based medicine for the International Medical Corps, a California-based relief group. Yesterday, relief workers recovered thousands of bodies in Indonesia alone, sometimes digging them out of the rubble with bare hands.
However, as time passes, some bodies will be consumed by wild animals or wash ashore far from anyone who knew them. Even bodies that have been recovered will be difficult to identify in the absence of dental records, said Amowitz. As a result, any final death toll must necessarily be an estimate rather than a tallying up of identifiable individuals.
Calculating the death toll of a disaster is difficult even for highly technological societies such as the United States. The federal government initially estimated the toll from the World Trade Center attack in 2001 at 6,729, but eventually lowered the number to about 2,800 as people who had been unaccounted for turned up safe and as others were found to have been counted twice.
In developing countries, where there is no formal census and few identification documents such as driver's licenses or credit cards, counting the dead is much harder, often resulting in broad, sometimes conflicting, estimates. For instance, estimates of the death toll in a devastating earthquake at Tangshan, China, in 1976 range between 250,000 and 655,000. Likewise, the government of Iran settled on an estimate of 30,000 deaths in the earthquake centered on the city of Bam last December, 50 percent more than initially thought.
In the South Asia disaster, the final death toll will hinge in part on the fate of thousands of fishermen who were at sea on the day of the tsunamis as well as on reaching regions that have no communucation with central governments. In India, relief workers are just reaching remote locations such as the 572 islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelagoes, which includes Chowra.
In addition to logistical obstacles, there may be political ones as well. The UN Children's Fund yesterday put out a statement saying that the death toll was "at least 90" in Burma, even though the military government put the total at 34. The organization suggested the toll will rise substantially because 17 coastal villages were destroyed in the storm, noting that Burmese officials "have not provided a great deal of details about the full scope of this disaster."
Unfortunately, said Tufts' Moomaw, casualty estimates are not mere debating points, but the basis for sending international relief to the region. "The aid agencies need to know: Are we talking about 1,000 people, 15,000 people?" he said. If governments undercount the death toll, it may slow the flow of aid to the survivors, but the prospect of more aid can also give governments an incentive to overcount casualties.
Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com. 