Governments and emergency workers across southern Asia are struggling to find victims and assess damage from Sunday's devastating tsunamis, which left more than 23,000 people dead throughout the region.
The death toll continues to rise and thousands of people are still missing --including foreign tourists who had flocked to southeast Asia at the height of its tourist season. The disaster was touched off when a 9.0 magnitude underwater earthquake off the coast of Indonesia triggered huge waves which powered their way across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean.
The hardest-hit countries include Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives and Indonesia, where entire villages were wiped out and more than a million people have been left homeless. Thousands more were injured. Rescue workers spent Monday trying to collect bodies and get aid to victims, while residents buried their dead in mass graves.
The United Nations estimates the disaster will cost billions of dollars. Nearly 5,000 people are known to have died in Indonesia, while close to 11,000 bodies have been recovered in Sri Lanka. Officials in southern India list 6,600 people as dead. In Thailand, the death toll has jumped to over 800. Deaths have also been reported in Malaysia, the Maldives, Burma, Bangladesh, and as far away as Somalia.
